M. R. James

“ Moors, Italy is inert, England begins to be harried by the Northmen. On the whole, if there really was a Dark Age, the middle of the eighth century seems to answer the description best. But, of course, there were points of light. The great centres of Northern France, such as Corbie and Laon, particularly Corbie, were beginning their activities of collecting and copying books. Ireland was capable of producing such a work as the Book of Kells—whether it actually falls within the century or not I will not be positive, but work of the same amazing beauty was carried out before 800. ”

“ In spite of the long history and great wealth of Bordeaux, Marseilles, Arles, Narbonne, Toulouse, you will not trace many famous books to those places. The city which, on the whole, has preserved its early manuscripts best is Albi, but it was never a great centre of learning, and its library, though extremely interesting, is not large. ”

“ Naturally I have picked out books which have some traceable story. Very many have none. We can only say of them that they were written in such a century and such a country, and acquired at such a date: and there [11] an end. Rebinding and loss of leaves, especially of fly-leaves, have carried off names of owners and library-marks, and apart from that there are but very few cases in which we are warranted in proclaiming from the aspect and character of the script that a book was written at one particular place and nowhere else. ”

“ Italy, then, is the hub of the universe for books; [43] and in Italy, Florence, Naples, and Rome are the most active nuclei. We have a record written by a Florentine bookseller, Vespasiano Bisticci, in the form of short biographies of great persons, many of whom had dealt with him. For some he provided whole libraries, as for Frederick, Duke of Urbino, whose books are now mostly in the Vatican. Such a man as this would not look at a printed book—which in Vespasiano's mind is, of course, very greatly to his credit; for the press was bound to put an end to his particular industry. ”

“ Coming to later times, it is apparent that at the Dissolution groups of books from a single abbey came into the hands of a single man. If I find Dakcombe on the fly-leaf of a MS., I am almost entitled to assume that it is a Winchester book: John Stonor got his books from Reading Abbey, John Young drew from Fountains, and so forth. Lastly, and most rarely, you are justified in saying that the handwriting and decoration of this or that book shows it to have been written at St. Albans or at Canterbury. ”

“ Spain kept her books very much to herself, one would guess, judging from the very few Spanish MSS. of this age which are to be met with in the rest of Europe. The guess, however, would not be quite correct. There was one great Spanish scholar in the seventh century, Isidore of Seville (636) , and his encyclopædia (The Etymologies or Origins) , which fed many later centuries with learning, made its way all over educated Europe very quickly. Not only so, but we find English scholars (Aldhelm and Bede) quoting Spanish writers on grammar and Spanish poets who were almost their own contemporaries. ”

“ It had been a cherished project of his to found an academy at Rome where all such learning might be fostered, but that plan failed, and Cassiodorus took into his retreat at Vivarium all the store of books he had accumulated, and wrote a little manual to guide his monks to the right use of them. His Institutes (as the book is called) do not give a set catalogue of his library, but there are many and striking coincidences between the manual and the literary works which can be traced to Bobbio. A specimen may be given: he recommends a writer on gardening called Gargilius Martialis. ”

“ Then, again, every well-to-do person must have his or her Book of Hours, illuminated if possible. Such things were common wedding-presents, it seems. Upon the best of them really great artists were employed, like Foucquet of Tours and Gerard David; we even find Perugino painting a page in one, but the average are shop work made for the Italian market at Naples or Florence, for the French at Paris, Tours, or Rouen, for the English very often at Bruges, where also many sumptuous chronicle books and French versions of [47] secular history and romances were turned out. ”

“ The pedigree of one of Laud's MSS. may be familiar, but is too illuminating to be omitted. It is a seventh-century copy of the Acts of the Apostles in Greek and Latin. The earliest home to which we can trace it is Sardinia; a document connected with that island is written on a fly-leaf. Then we find indisputable evidence that Bede, writing early in the eighth century, had access to it; he quotes in his Retractations on the Acts readings which are characteristic of it; and as he never left his monastery in the North, we may be sure that the book was at Jarrow or Wearmouth in his time. ”

“ The Canterbury Codex Aureus is at Stockholm. The famous Utrecht Psalter, written, perhaps, in the Rheims district, strayed from the Cotton collection to its present home in Holland, we do not know how. All these, and some other remarkable illuminated books that could be named (I ought not to omit a Peterborough Psalter at Brussels) , are not library books, but rather properties of great ecclesiastics or nobles. The largest collections have never yet been thoroughly searched. ”

“ Some of the Peterhouse books are traceable in the Ashmole collection, the Pepys Library, and the British Museum; of those of Queen's College I can say nothing. Dee was specially interested in mathematics, alchemy, and, as everyone knows, converse with spirits, but his library was not confined to books on these subjects; he had some excellent historical, literary, and theological MSS. [86] One of them was the best copy of Alfred's translation of Orosius.
Another library of the sixteenth century deserves to be singled out from the many which offer themselves for notice. ”

“ Often great liberties in the way of revision and even abridgment of the text were taken by the scholars of the time, and, once transcribed, the old archetypes were neglected or even destroyed.
Books of very great beauty—Bibles, Gospels, Psalters—were produced for the Emperors and the great nobles and prelates. In these there is a marked effort to imitate and continue the traditions of classical art.
Tenth Century.—The tradition of study and scholarship lives on, but the impulse from Britain and Ireland has worked itself out, and few geniuses are born on the Continent. ”

“ Greenwell of Durham found, a leaf of a sixth-century Latin Bible from Wearmouth or Jarrow (or perhaps even from Cassiodorus's library) in a curiosity shop, is a chance that comes to few. But I have always lamented that I did not pass through the streets of Orléans at the time (not many years back) when an illustrated Greek MS. of the Gospels on purple vellum and in gold and silver uncials was exposed for sale in a shop window. ”

“ France, Germany, and England will serve as specimens. Of Italy perhaps enough has been said incidentally to attract attention to the most important centres, such as Bobbio, Monte Cassino, and Verona, and upon the whole I do not think that in Italy this class of library played so great a part in the later Middle Ages as it did in the rest of Europe.
France is full of Latin MSS. Every considerable town, besides many that are inconsiderable, has its public library, into which at the Revolution were collected the remains of the libraries of the religious houses of the district. ”

“ Irishmen who know Greek flock to the Continent, driven from home by Danish invasion: such are Johannes Scottus Eriugena and Sedulius Scottus. They haunt Liége, Laon, Aix-la-Chapelle, and penetrate to Italy. Not less prolific are the French houses: at Tours the handwriting called the Carolingian minuscule, the parent of our modern "Roman" printing, is developed, though not at Tours alone. At Corbie, Fleury on the Loire, (now called St. Bénoit sur Loire) , St. Riquier by Abbeville, Rheims, and many another centre in Northern and Eastern France, libraries are accumulated and ancient books copied. ”

“ Persons who take pains to advertise themselves as book-lovers or bibliomaniacs are rarely those who render great services to literature.
Perhaps the libraries of the pre-Reformation colleges of Oxford and Cambridge are the best hunting-grounds for traces of the early collectors. At Peterhouse, Cambridge is a large bequest from John Warkworth, Master late in the fifteenth century; another from J. Dyngley, Fellow, whose books were written expressly for him ”

“ The only catalogue we have for this abbey is an early one (eleventh to twelfth century) written on the fly-leaves of a copy of Genesis (glossed) at Pembroke College, Cambridge. [67] Thus it contains no fourteenth or fifteenth century books, nor, indeed, has it many entries of extant books of earlier date which we are sure belonged to Bury; but it is not to be despised, though we depend more upon press-marks than upon it for guidance. Bury press-marks were an introduction of the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. ”

“ A glance at the apparatus criticus of a few editions of classics will show that often a fifteenth-century MS. ranks high among the authorities for the text. Pedigree is what matters, not beauty of hand, nor, necessarily, date.
It has been the fate of these scholars' books, as it is the fate of all MSS., to be absorbed into great libraries, and many of them lurk there still unexamined and their origin undetermined. Discoveries, no doubt, yet remain to be made among them. ”

“ The list of such catalogues issued by the British Museum they will find invaluable; the catalogues themselves, alike those of dealers and of sales, will often enable them to trace a particular MS. back through a whole century to some Italian palace or Flemish abbey, sold up or secularized under the stress of revolution. This period of MS. history has been less well worked than the earlier ones; it is but just ripening, in fact; but to anyone who is bitten with the passion for the books it will prove just as fascinating as the others. ”

“ There are important MSS. from Thorney at the Advocates Library, Edinburgh; from St. Mary's York, at Dublin; not a few from Cirencester at Jesus College, Oxford, and at Hereford; St. John's, Oxford, has many from Reading and from Southwick (Hants) . There must, I am sure, be many Peterborough books to be found, but they are rarely marked as such, and the character of the catalogue makes identification very hard. ”

“ It is certain that soon after 1450 that college possessed some 174 MSS., among which such titles as Plato's Republic in Latin and a Greek-English dictionary betray a humanistic influence which is not likely to have been that of our founder, Henry VI. Moreover, the only one of those MSS. that remains is a Latin version of some orations of St. Athanasius, made by a secretary of the Duke, and dedicated to the Duke; and in the British Museum is another volume of Athanasius translated by the same man, which actually has Duke Humphrey's inscription in it. ”

“ Over a hundred MSS. from Norwich are known to me, but they are a very small fraction of the library, as is shown by the numerals attached to the several class letters. Very few of them are as old as the twelfth century; [66] late twelfth and particularly early fourteenth make up the bulk. I attribute this to the great fire of 1286, and I take it that then the greater part of the priory books were spoiled, and that energetic steps to refill the library were taken in the years that followed. There are more Norwich books in the University Library at Cambridge than anywhere else ”

“ Some few have kept their books [72] in situ—the monastic cathedrals of Durham and Worcester best of all; each has some hundreds of MSS. The secular cathedrals, Lincoln, Hereford, Salisbury, come next. Rochester has nothing on the spot, but a great many MSS. in the old Royal Library in the British Museum. The two great libraries of Canterbury (Christchurch and St. Augustine's) are well represented, but their books are much scattered. Winchester, York, Exeter, have few but precious books. ”

“ The Cistercian Order, now founding houses everywhere, is, I think, specially active in filling its libraries with fine but austerely plain copies of standard works, eschewing figured decoration in its books, as in its buildings, and caring little for secular learning. ”

“ Among the most useful I reckon those of Christchurch, Canterbury, Peterborough (an anomalous one) , Glastonbury, Bury St. Edmunds, Rochester, Dover, Lincoln, Leicester Abbey (not yet printed in full) , Ramsey, Rievaulx, Lanthony-by-Gloucester, Titchfield. There are a good many short catalogues for smaller houses, written on the fly-leaves of books, which do not, as a rule, help us much. The list of monastic catalogues, however, is dreadfully defective. We have none for St. Albans or Norwich or Crowland or Westminster, for Gloucester or Worcester, St. Mary's, York, or Fountains. ”

“ For the best part of a century before the latter date, the export of precious MSS. to Italy had been going on, and many of our greatest treasures were already safe in the hands of scholars when the crash came. Nor is it possible, I believe, to show that between [15] 1204 and 1453 many authors whose works no longer exist were read in Byzantine circles. That there was destruction of books in 1453 is no doubt true; but within a very few years the Turks had learned that money was to be made of them, and the sale and export went on at a great rate. ”

“ One at least of the remarkable collection given by Archbishop Parker to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge (193) , is a Corbie book—a product evidently of the Corbie scriptorium, though it bears on its first leaf the traces of an inscription of ownership which, illegible as it is, does seem to be that of another monastery. Parker's is, on the whole, so English a collection that the presence of this early French book arrests attention. It does not, however, stand quite alone ”