for more than they cared to acknowledge, to the materials provided them in the works of the Scot. But in the dark age that followed, those writings seem to have been almost unknown. Early in the tenth century, indeed, we meet with an extract from a poem apparently of John's composition, and a passage from the Division of Nature is cited in a theological treatise written a little later;[1] but in neither case is the source of the quotation indicated. Then, again, when the Scot's book On the Body and Blood of Christ obtained a sudden notoriety in the dispute raised by Berengar of Tours on the nature of the sacrament, the importance attached to his authority by the opponent of transubstantiation is valuable as evidence of the power that his name still possessed; but it is nearly certain that the work to which Berengar appealed, and which was burnt by the council of Vercelli, was the production not of John but of his contemporary the monk Ratramnus. A solitary trace of John's influence may be found in the fact that, probably through some glosses of his, the Satyricon of Martianus Capella soon came to take once more that recognised place in the schools which it had held centuries earlier in the dark days of Gregory of Tours; but the acceptance of this meagre compendium only shews how incapable his heirs were of appreciating the treasure he had left them in his own works.[2]
- ↑ In the tract De corpore et sanguine Domini commonly ascribed to Gerbert. See Carl von Prantl, Geschichte der Logik im Abendlande 2. 57 [58] n. 227; 1861: cf. Huber 434. Neither of these writers adverts to the doubt which hangs over the authorship of the book. See below p. 77 n. 12.
- ↑ It has been supposed that the book, of which the full title is De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii, a tasteless allegory descriptive of the seven liberal arts – was the exclusive possession of the Irish: cf. Haddan, Remains 273 sq., 280. In Alcuin the very name does not occur, and Mr Mullinger, pp. 64 sqq., 111, 118, has elaborated a theory of this writer's studied hostility to Martianus. Had however such a motive existed I feel confident that it would have appeared somewhere in Alcuin's writings, His silence has much rather the look of ignorance. Nor can it be said that the work was only read 'wherever pious scruples did not prevent' (p. 65), in face of abundant instances of its use from Remigius of Auxerre to John of Salisbury.
