of Sponheim owes its great renown to John Tritheim, who was abbot at the close of the 15th century. He found it reduced to 10 volumes, and left it with upwards of 2000 at his retirement. The library at St Gall, formed as early as 816 by Gozbert, its second abbot, still exists.
England.In England the principal collections were those of Canter bury, York, Wearmouth, Whitby, Glastonbury, Croyland, Peterborough, and Durham. Of the library of the monastery of Christ Church, Canterbury, originally founded by Augustine and Theodore, and restored by Lanfranc and Anselm, a catalogue has been preserved dating from the 13th or 14th century, and containing 698 volumes, with about 3000 works. Bennet Biscop, the first abbot of Wearmouth, made five journeys to Rome, and on each occasion returned with a store of books for the library. It was destroyed by the Danes about 867. Of the library at Whitby there is a catalogue dating from the 12th century. The catalogue of Glastonbury has also been printed.[1] When the library of Croyland perished by fire in 1091 it contained about 700 volumes. The library at Peterborough was also rich; from a catalogue of about the end of the 14th century it had 344 volumes, with nearly 1700 titles. The catalogues of the library at the monastery of Durham have been printed by the Surtees Society, and form an interesting series.
These catalogues with many others[2] afford abundant evidence of the limited character of the monkish collections, whether we look at the number of their volumes or at the nature of their contents. We must remember that the beliefs and discipline imposed upon the monk hardly allowed of his caring for literature for its own sake; we must also remember that the transcription of manuscripts so industriously pursued in the monasteries was a mechanical employment. The scriptoria were manufactories of books and not centres of learning. Indeed the very pains bestowed upon carefulness and neatness of transcription, and especially upon the illustrating and ornamenting of the more beautiful manuscripts, were little calculated to divert the attention of the monks from the vehicle to the thought which it expressed. The pride taken by so many communities in the richness and splendour of their libraries was often doubtless the pride of the collector and not of the scholar. That in spite of the labours of so many transcribers the costliness and scarcity of books remained so great may have been partly, but cannot have been wholly, due to the scarcity of writing materials. It may be suspected that indolence and carelessness were the rule in most monasteries, and that but few of the monks keenly realized the whole force of the sentiment expressed by one of their number in the 12th century " Claustrum sine armario quasi castrum sine armamentario." Nevertheless it must be admitted that to the labours of the monkish transcribers we are indebted for the preservation of Latin literature.
Arabians.The first conquests of the Arabians, as we have already seen, threatened hostility to literature. But, as soon as their conquests were secured, the caliphs became the patrons of learning and science. Greek manuscripts were eagerly sought for and translated into Arabic, and colleges and libraries everywhere arose. Baghdad in the East and Cordova in the West became the seats of a rich development of letters and science during the age when the civilization of Europe was most obscured. Cairo and Tripoli were also distinguished for their libraries. The royal library of the Fatimites in Africa is said to have numbered 100,000 manuscripts, while that collected by the Omayyads of Spain is reported to have contained six times as many. It is said that there were no less than seventy libraries opened in the cities of Andalusia. Whether these figures be exaggerated or not—and they are much below those given by some Arabian writers, which are undoubtedly so—it is certain that the libraries of the Arabians and the Moors of Spain offer a very remarkable contrast to those of the Christian nations during the same period.[3]
The literary and scientific activity of the Arabians appears to have been the cause of a revival of letters amongst the Greeks of the Byzantine empire in the 9th century. Under Leo the Philosopher and Constantine Porphyrogenitus the libraries of Constantinople awoke into renewed life. The compilations of such writers as Stobseus, Photius, and Suidas, as well as the labours of innumerable critics and commentators, bear witness to the activity, if not to the lofty character of the pursuits, of the Byzantine scholars. The labours of transcription were industriously pursued in the libraries and in the monasteries of Mount Athos and the Ægean, and it was from these quarters that the restorers of learning brought into Italy so many Greek manuscripts.Renaissance.In this way many of the treasures of ancient literature had been already conveyed to the West before the fate which overtook the libraries of Constantinople on the fall of the city in 1453.
Meanwhile in the West, with the reviving interest in literature which already marks the 14th century, we find arising outside the monasteries a taste for collecting books. St Louis of France and his successors had formed small collections, none of which survived its possessor. It was reserved for Charles V. to form a considerable library which he intended to be permanent. In 1373 he had amassed 910 volumes, and had a catalogue of them prepared, from which we see that it included a good deal of the new literature. In our own country Guy, earl of Warwick, formed a curious collection of French romances, which he bequeathed to Bordesley Abbey on his death in 1315. Richard d'Aungervyle of Bury, the author of the Philobiblon, amassed a noble collection of books, and had special opportunities of doing so as Edward III.'s chancellor and ambassador. He founded Durham College at Oxford, and equipped it with a library a hundred years before Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, made his benefaction of books to the university. The taste for secular literature, and the enthusiasm for the ancient classics, gave a fresh direction to the researches of collectors. A disposition to encourage literature began to show itself amongst the great. This was most notable amongst the Italian princes. Cosimo de' Medici formed a library at Venice while living there in exile in 1433, and on his return to Florence laid the foundation of the great Medicean library. The honour of establishing the first modern public library in Italy had been already secured by Niccolo Niccoli, who left his library of over 800 volumes for the use of the public on his death in 1436. Frederick, duke of Urbino, collected all the writings in Greek and Latin which he could procure, and we have an interesting account of his collection written by his first librarian, Vespasiano. The ardour for classical studies led to those active researches for the Latin writers who were buried in the monastic libraries which are especially identified with the name of Poggio. For some time before the fall of that capital, the perilous state
- ↑ By Hearne in his edition of John of Glastonbury.
- ↑ Many such catalogues may be found in the collections of D'Achery, Martene and Durand, and Pez, and in the bibliographical periodicals of Naumann and Petzholdt. The Rev. Joseph Hunter has collected some particulars as to the contents of the English monastic libraries, and Mr Edwards has printed a list of the catalogues known to exist (Libraries and Founders of Libraries, 1865, pp. 448-54). There are said to be over six hundred such catalogues in the Royal Library at Munich.
- ↑ Among the Arabs, however, as among the Christians, theological bigotry did not always approve of non-theological literature, and the great library of Cordova was sacrificed by Almanzor to his reputation for orthodoxy, 978 A.D.
