MAirusoams
618
ItAHUSO&IPTS
The missionaries who left Rome to evangelize the
Germanic peoples, such as Augustine in 597, brought
with them manuscripts which they were to reproduce
in the monastericE foimded by them. In the seventh
century Benedict Biscop made four journeys to Rome
and brought thence numerous MSS.; in 682 he
founded the monastery of Jarrow which became one
of the chief intellectual centres of England. Theodore
of Tarsus (668-680) accomplished a similar work when
he reorganized the AnglcnSaxon Church. The first
period of monastic activity (sixth-seventh centuries)
18 represented in our libraries by a larse number of
Biblical MSS., many of which come Trom Ireland
("Liber Armachanus" of Dublin), England ("CJodex
Amiatinus" of Florence, copied at Wearmouth under
Wilfrid, and offered to the pope in 716; " Harley Evan-
geliary", Brit. Mus., seventh century), some from
Spain (Palimpsest of Leon, cathedral archives,
seventh century). Finally the library of the Univer-
sity of Upsala possesses the "(Dodex Argenteus, on
purple parchment, written in the fifth century, which
contains the Bible of Ulphilas, the first translation
into a (jermanic language of the Holy Scriptures.
At the end of the seventh and during the eighth century Gaul became more and more barbarous; monasteries were destroyed or ravaged, culture dis- appeared, and when Charlemagne undertook the re- organization of Eiux)pe he addressed himself to the coimtries in which culture was still flourishing in the monasteries, to England, Ireland, Lombardy. The Carolingian renaissance, as the movement has been called, nad as its principle the establishment of copying rooms at the imperial court itself and in the monasteries. One of the most active promoters of the movement was Alcuin (735-804), wiio after having directed the library' and school of York, became in 793 Abbot of St. Martin of Tours. Here he founded a school of calligraphy which produced the most beauti- ful MSS. of the Carolingian epoch. Several specimens distributed by Charlemagne among the various mon- asteries of the empire became the models which were imitated everywhere, even in Saxony, where the new monasteries founded by Charlemagne became the fore- most centres of Germanic culture. M. L. DeUsIe (M^m. de I'Acad. des Inscript., XXXII, 1) has com- piled a list of twenty-five MSS. which proceeded from this school of Tours (Bible of Charles the Bald, Paris, Bib. Nat., Lat. No. 1; Bible of Alcuin, Brit. Mui>., 10546; manuscripts at Quedlinburg relating to the life of St. Martin; Sacramentaries of Metz and Tours of the Paris Bibliothdque Nationale, etc.).
Among the works proceeding from the imperial scriptorium attached to the Palatine School is men- tioned the Evangeliary copied for Charlemagne by the monk Godescalc in 781 (now at the Biblioth^que Na- tionale), and the Psalter of Dagulf presented to Adrian I (now at the Imperial Library of \ ienna) . Other im- portant scriptoria were established at Orleans by binhop Theodulfe (whence issued the two beautiful Bibles now kept in the treasurN' of the cathedral of Puy and of the Bibliotheque Nationale, I^t. 9380). at St. Ainand (where the copvist Hucbald contrijjutea eight- een volumes to the uorarv), at St. Gall, under the Abbots Grimaldus (841-872) and Ilardmut (872-883), who caased the making of a complete Bible in nine vol- umes; there are extant ten Biblical MSS. iMitten or corrected by Hardmut. At St. Gall and in many otlier monasteries the influence of Irish monks is very marked (M8S. of Tours, Wurzburg, Berne, BobUo, etc.) . Besides numerous Biblical MS»S. there are found among the works of the Carolingian epoch many MSS. of the classical authors. Hardmut nad had copied Josephus, Justin, Martianus Capella, Oosius, Isidore of Seville: one of the most beautiful MSS. of the school of Tours is the Virgil of the library of Berne, copied by the deacon Bemon. Many of these works were even ftnuuJated into the \'ulgar tongue: at St. Gall there
were Irish translations of Galen and Hippocrates, and
at the end of the ninth century King Alfred (849-000)
translated into English the works of Boethius, Ore-
sius, Bede, etc. At this epoch many monasteries pos-
s^sed libraries of considerable size: when in 906 the
monks of Novalaise (near Susa) fled bef(U« the Sara-
cens they carried to Turin a library of six thousand
MSS.
The period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries may be considered as the golden age of monastic manuscript writing. In each monastery there was a special hall, called the scriptorium , reserved for the labours of the copyists. On the ancient plan of St. Gall it is shown beside the church. In the Benedic- tine monasteries there was a special benediction for^ mula for this hall (Ducange, "Glossar. niedisB et inf. latin.", s. v. Scriptorium). Absolute silence reigned there. At the head of the scriptorium the bibUothe- cariua distributed the tasks, and, once copied, the MSS. were carefully revised by the corredcMres, In the schools the pupils were often allowed as an honour to copy MSS. (for instance at Fleury-sur-Loire) . Every- where the monks seem to have given themselves with great ardour to the labour which was considered one of the most edifying works of the monastic life. At St. Evroult (Normandy) was a monk who was saved because the number of letters copied by him equalled the number of his sins (Ordericus Vitafis, III, 3); In the "explicit" which concluded the book the scribe often gave liis name and the date on which his work ended: he sometimes declared that he wrote " for the salvation of his soul " and commended himself to the prayers of the reader. Division of labour seems as yet not to have been fully established, and there were monks who were both scribes and illuminators (Ord. Vital., Ill, 7). The Bible remained the book whidi was copied by preference. The Bible was c<^]ed either entire {btblwthe^a) or in part (Pentateuch, the Psalter, Gospels and Epistles, Evangeliaria, in which the (jospels followed the order of the feasts). Then came the commentaries on the Scriptures, the liturgical books, the Fathers of the Church, worlm of dogmatic or moral theology, chronicles, annals, lives oi the saints, histories of churches or monasteries, and lastly profane authors, the study of which never ceased entirely. Rather a large number of them are found among the one thousand MSS. in the library of Cluny. At St. Denis even Greek MSS. were comd (Paris, Bib. Nation., gr. 375, copied in 1022). The newer religious orders, Cistercians. Carthusians^ etc., manifested the same zeal as the Benedictines m the copying of MSS.
Then beginning with the thirteenth centurv the labour of copyists began to be secularized. About the universities such as that of Paris were a large num- ber of laymen who gained a livelihood by c<»ying; in 1275 those of Paris were admitted as agents cm the uni- versity; in 1292 we find at Paris twenty-four book- sellers who copied MSS. or caused them to be copied. Colleges such as the Sorbonne also had their cc^ying rooms. On the other liand at the end of the thii^ teenth centu^^' in the greater number of monasteriet the copying ot MSS. ceased. Although there were still monks who were copyists, such as Giles of Mauleoo, who copied the "Hours" of Queen Jeanne of Bur- gundy (1317) at St. ^nis, the copWng and the illu- mination of SiSS. became a lucrative craft. At this juncture kings and princes l>egan to develop a taste for books and to form libraries; that of St. Louis was one of the earliest. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries these amateurs had in their pay veritable armies of copyists. Thenceforth it was they who di- rected the movement of the production of MiSS. The most famous \*-ere Popes John XXII (1316-34), Bene- dict XII (13;J4-42); the poet Petmrch (1304-74), who was not satisfied with purchasing the BlSS. in convents but himself formed a school of copyists in order to have
