The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts

Towards the end of the century Italy comes forward as the great purveyor of books of a special sort. The University of Bologna becomes the great law school of Europe, and exports in numbers copies of the immense texts and commentaries of and upon the Church (Canon) and Roman (Civil) law which were indispensable to the unfortunate student. These books become common at the end of the thirteenth century, and run over well into the fourteenth. They are prettily (but often very carelessly) written in a round Gothic hand, sometimes christened "Bolognese." Some were not only written but decorated (with poorish ornament) on the spot, but very many were exported in sheets and provided, in France or England, with such decoration as the purchaser could afford. A leading example is a copy of the Decretals in the British Museum (Royal 10, E. iv.) which belonged to St. Bartholomew's, Smithfield. It is in Italian script, but on each of the spacious lower margins of its many pages is a picture by an English artist; these pictures run in sets, illustrating Bible stories, legends, and romances.

As the centuries go on, the material they have left increases in bulk, and the complication of the threads is proportionately greater. I cannot hope in a survey like this to give prominence to every factor; but we shall not be wrong in fixing upon Northern France and England as the areas of greatest productiveness and the sources of the best art in the thirteenth century.

Before we pass to the next century a word must be devoted to a not unimportant class of books which seem to have been manufactured chiefly in Picardy and Artois, the illustrated Romances—e.g. the Grail and Lancelot—of great bulk, usually in prose, which served to pass the winter evenings of persons of quality. A few of these, and a book of devotions to take to church (oftenest a Psalter at this time; later on a book of Hours), were the staple books owned by the upper classes.

Fourteenth Century.—If the thirteenth century gives us on the whole the noblest books, the early part of the fourteenth affords the loveliest. They come from England, France, and the Netherlands. A noticeable element in their art is that of the grotesque and burlesque, never, of course, quite absent even from early books, but now most prominent and most delightful. The defect of the art of this time is lack of strength and austerity; its delicacy is above praise.

The middle of the century sees Petrarch, and with him the Renaissance begins. Italy has been producing great men in every field, but the work of Petrarch reached farther and was more enduring than that of any other.

France, tortured by wars, put forth little in the middle years, but then came Charles V., a King who was really interested in books, and the library he formed at the Louvre gave a stimulus to book-production which spread wide and lasted long. Under Richard II. and through his Queen, Anne of Bohemia, a foreign influence makes itself felt in England, and some lovely results are achieved; but on the whole English art is waning.

The Universities, and to some extent the monasteries, were throughout this century great customers for the bulky books of scholastic divinity (Duns Scotus, Albertus, and the like) and the later generation of commentators on the Bible, such as Nicolas de Lyra and Hugo de S. Caro. Many shelves are filled with these.

Fifteenth Century.—The fifteenth century is our last; it ends the MS. period. Under the influence of the Renaissance, now enormously potent, every Italian noble forms a library. The scholars are seeking out the ninth-century copies of the classics, and they discard the Gothic (black-letter) hands of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in favour of the Carolingian minuscule (or, some say that of the twelfth century). As early as 1426 we find books written in a script adapted and refined from this; we call it a Roman hand, though the great centre of its propagation seems to have been Florence. In all essentials it is the parent of the type in which this page will be printed.

Italy, then, is the hub of the universe for books; 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. We still find, by the way, this prejudice against print in the very last years of the century. Some rich persons had MS. copies actually made from printed editions and elaborately illustrated. Such a one was Raphael de Marcatellis, natural son of Philip the Good of Burgundy and titular Bishop of Rhossus, near Antioch.2 Part of his library may be found at Ghent, part at Holkham, and stray volumes at Cambridge (Peterhouse) and in the Arundel collection at the British Museum. They are very handsome books, and many have full-page paintings by capable artists, but the resulting impression is on the whole that of decadence.

Matthias Corvinus, King of Hungary (d. 1490), is a name famous among old bibliophiles. He got together a library of fine books, mostly recent copies made for him, and it was dispersed and sacked by the Turks in 1526. It is spoken of with bated breath by the old writers, as if it had contained priceless treasures. I am sceptical.

Ferdinand of Aragon and Calabria was a collector of the same kind, whose beautiful books, adorned with his arms in the lower margin of the first page, are many of them at Valencia, having passed to the University there by way of the Abbey of St. Miguel de Los Reyes. These are of Italian and not of Spanish manufacture, and very fine they are.

These last-mentioned libraries have been scattered, but there are still some of the Renaissance period which survive in their original homes. The Laurentian at Florence and the Vatican at Rome stand at the head of all. With regard to the latter it may be said that though earlier Popes, of course, had libraries (that of Avignon was quite considerable), yet Nicholas V. (d. 1455) must be regarded as the founder of the Vatican library in its present state. So, too, the Marciana at Venice and the Malatestiana at Cesena must rank as genuine Renaissance collections.

It was not only the great men who loved to have books. The tribe of scholars, foreign as well as native, who coveted them was numerous. Every library now has its quota of humbler copies of the classics, often on paper, in the Roman or the more cursive Italic hand, not written by a professional scribe. Often these are of infinitesimal value, transcripts of extant copies of no greater age; but there is always the possibility that they may be a competent scholar's own careful apograph of some ancient MS. which a Poggio had unearthed at St. Gall, and which has since vanished. 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.

Whether or not a breath of influence from Italy was the cause, it is plain that library-making was popular in countries and circles which were not obviously affected by the Renaissance. The monasteries of England were certainly not so affected, yet we find many of them setting their books in order and building special rooms to contain them. Christchurch at Canterbury and Bury St. Edmunds are leading instances. Now, too, Universities and colleges made fresh catalogues, and received large accessions of books.

If the Renaissance did not touch the English public as a whole in this century, it made some proselytes. Among Englishmen who dealt with our Florentine Vespasiano were John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, William Gray, Bishop of Ely, Andrew Holes, of Wells. Others who resorted to Italy were John Free, Thomas Linacre, John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells, William Flemming, Dean of Lincoln, William Tilley of Sellinge, Prior of Christchurch, Canterbury. We shall see later on what traces some of these have left on our libraries.

In places to which the Italian influence did not penetrate the humdrum trade of copying went on. Anselm, Bernard, and Augustine; sermon-books by the score; Burley on Aristotle, etc. Then, in another class, the production of books for use in church was very large. There were few Bibles, but Missals, Breviaries, large choir-books to be laid on the lectern, Graduals and Processionals, are legion. 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 secular history and romances were turned out. Edward IV. had a considerable number of such in his library.

These private Prayer Books are, of course, incomparably the commonest of all illuminated manuscripts. They vary from loveliness to contemptibility. Perversely, they figure in catalogues, and are lettered on their backs, as Missals; our ancestors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries forgot that a Missal must contain the service of the Mass, and that none of these books do.

There, then, is a second survey of our ground, somewhat more detailed than the first, but woefully sketchy. Everyone who has studied MSS. of any class or period would detect omissions in it which for him would vitiate the whole story. The best I can hope is that the assertions in it are not incorrect, and that it gives a true notion of the general course of book-production in medieval times.

Wanderings of Latin MSS.: the Continent

We are now to concern ourselves with the later destinies of the books which we have seen in the making. Here generalities will be less in place; nevertheless, I must begin with some.

There are two main classes of persons interested in MSS.: those who care for their literary contents, and those who prize them for their artistic beauty. Roughly speaking—very roughly—the precious literary things of ancient times were preserved in monastic and cathedral libraries, and the beautiful things in palaces and castles and church treasuries. I do not forget that poetry and romance in the vernacular were chiefly in the hands of the laity, nor do I depreciate their value as literature.

The ancient books, pagan and Christian, are perhaps to be regarded as the backbone of the subject, and therefore the first part of my enquiry shall be devoted to the ecclesiastical libraries, and considerations of space shall rule me on the other head.

The monastic and cathedral libraries can be best treated by countries. 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. France's Dissolution came at a time when many eyes were open to the possible value of ancient books, and strings could be pulled and influence exercised to stem the unreasoning fury that said:

We'll pull all arts and learning down,And hey, then, up go we!

It is easier, also, to rescue books than buildings. The Revolutionists tore down a cathedral, and it is gone; but books are portable and, moreover, do not burn or tear or drown easily, especially vellum MSS.; and when the first hurricane of idiocy had blown over they were very likely found, rather dustier than before, still on their shelves.

Nowadays our methods are more effective, of course; but I have said as much about that as I can bear.

If, then, one took a map of France and marked down the principal abbeys, one would have a fair prima-facie indication where to look for their MSS. From Corbie, you would say, they went to Amiens, from Cîteaux to Dijon, from Bec and Mont St. Michel to Avranches, and so on. This would be right, but there are exceptions. Corbie, a specially important library, is one.

When in 1636 the French under Louis XIII. regained that territory from the Spaniards, the precarious situation of its treasures was recognized, and 400 select MSS. were taken to Paris. The Reformed Benedictines of the Congregation of St. Maur had done much at Corbie for the preservation of the books, and they now petitioned that the Corbie MSS. might not be alienated from the Order, "n' ayant personne qui soit si jaloux de conserver l'héritage de leurs pères que les propres enfants." The petition was successful, and the MSS. were placed in the Abbey of St. Germain des Près at Paris. This was in 1638. In 1791, during the Revolutionary troubles, there was a fire at the abbey, and in the confusion a batch of early books was stolen. These came into the hands of a Russian envoy, Dubrowsky, and most of them, if not all, are (or were until a more recent Revolution) in the Imperial Library at Petrograd. The rest, still a great collection, were drafted out of St. Germain into the National Library in 1795-96. Meanwhile a large number (including some very important books) had remained at Corbie, and these did go to Amiens in or about 1791.

But before 1636 Corbie MSS. had begun to stray from home. One fairly clear case seems to be that of the Harley MS. 3,063, which was once in the library founded late in the fifteenth century at Cues, on the Moselle, by Cardinal Nicholas of Cues (Cusanus). It is one of two copies of the Latin version of Theodore of Mopsuestia's Commentary on the Pauline Epistles. The other is a Corbie book at Amiens. Both show the same gaps and blanks in the text, but the one is not believed to be a direct copy of the other. Both go back to a common original.

Other Corbie books are at Montpellier. They had a long roundabout journey to get there. Part of a magnificent collection formed by successive Bouhiers (seven of whom were Presidents of the Parlement de Bourgogne, and lived at Dijon), they were bought in 1781 from the heir of the last Bouhier by the last Abbot but one of Clairvaux. Then, when Clairvaux was suppressed at the Revolution, its library went to Troyes. Government commissioners were sent round to look through the departmental libraries and note the most valuable MSS. and printed books. One of those who visited Troyes was a Montpellier professor, Dr. Prunelle. The 300 and odd MSS. which he put aside would, if precedent had been followed, have gone to Paris, but they did in fact go to the famous old school of medicine at Montpellier, and there they are at this day.

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; there is a rather similar one (334) which Professor Lindsay tells me is a Laon book of about the same (eighth-century) date.

Corbie has occupied a considerable space, but it is entitled to do so on several accounts. The number of early MSS. traceable to it is very large, their intrinsic interest is high, and for a third reason I may again quote Professor Lindsay as having decided, from a minute study of the abbreviations used by Corbie scribes, that Anglo-Saxon influences were at work in the formation of its peculiar hand.

Corbie was, as I have hinted before, but one of many venerable centres of learning in the northern half of France. I shall not attempt a list of them, but go on to note one salient fact, that the southern half of the country is noticeably the poorer in MSS.

At Autun and Lyons, both of them magnificent cities in Roman times, some very ancient books did linger, and here is room for a digression. Lyons had a Pentateuch in Latin which was a great rarity, for not only was it in uncials of the fifth century, but it was of the Old Latin version, that made from the Greek before St. Jerome made his version from the Hebrew, which we call the Vulgate.

Rather before the middle of the nineteenth century an Italian adventurer of some learning and little virtue, the Chevalier Guglielmo (etc.) Libri, obtained employment under the French Government in the Department of Public Instruction, and was sent on a tour of inspection among provincial libraries. He made this the occasion for increasing a collection of MSS. which he had already begun for his private uses. Where he found that the town librarian was a good easy man, he removed (silently) from his keeping a selection of the most precious volumes, or, if it seemed unsafe to take the whole of a MS., he detached some few quires. Now and then he left a less valuable book in the place of the other. His best hunting-grounds were Tours, Orléans, and Lyons. At Lyons he conveyed away the Book of Leviticus and part of Numbers out of the Pentateuch. He had skilled workmen in his pay at Paris, who wrote names of other (generally Italian) monasteries and former owners on the first page of the stolen books, and otherwise disguised them; when he had made up a selection of a suitable bulk and attractiveness, he looked about for a wealthy purchaser, and found one in the Earl of Ashburnham, who bought en bloc, and whose manuscripts were not readily made accessible to the public. So the Lyons Leviticus and an illustrated sixth-century Pentateuch from Tours and many other precious things from Fleury (near Orléans) and elsewhere reposed in England until the early eighties, when M. Leopold Delisle made public the result of a most patient and most subtle investigation of the whole fraud, and a selection of the best of the plunder was got back for France. Sad to say, the municipalities which had been most negligent in keeping their MSS. refused to contribute to the recovery of them. They are still at Paris, to the advantage of students, but to the discredit of the provinces.

Meanwhile Libri's reputation had been thoroughly blown upon, and he retired from France, and was dead in Italy or elsewhere before his crimes had been atoned for. A great mass of his accumulations was bought from the Ashburnhams by the Italians and is now at Florence. Madame Libri survived, like Madame Fosco, to defend his memory.

To return. 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.

However, we need not be surprised at the poverty of a region which has had to undergo Albigensian crusades, English occupation, wars of religion, and a revolution.

Some of the great early libraries of Germany were mentioned in our historical survey. Fulda and Lorsch were as remarkable as any. At the present day Fulda retains only the few Bonifacian MSS. which rank as relics of the saint—the blood-stained volume of Ambrose which was on Boniface when the pagans killed him, his pocket copy of the Gospels, the MS. written for Victor of Capua. The bulk of its abbey library, which remained together until the close of the sixteenth century, is dispersed and gone, no one knows where. Some books are at Cassel in the ducal library. Lorsch has nothing in situ, but a good deal in the Vatican. Both houses were instrumental in preserving the classics; we owe to them Suetonius, Tacitus, Ammianus Marcellinus, and part of Livy.

The Thirty Years' War was responsible for a good deal of dispersion. Cargoes of books made their way to England, and Archbishop Laud bought and gave to the Bodleian many from Würzburg and Erfürt; in the Arundel collection at the British Museum the German contingent is large. Sweden also profited at this time, and got its lovely Codex Aureus (once at Canterbury), its Codex Argenteus (the Gothic Gospels at Upsala), and its Gigas, or Devil's Bible, which came from Prague.

In the Revolutionary period there was extensive secularization of abbeys, and whole libraries passed into central depots, as at Munich, which has the MSS. of St. Emmeram of Ratisbon and of Tegernsee, Benedictbeuern, Schäftlarn, and many other houses. Those of the old and rich foundation of Reichenau passed to Carlsruhe. Precious books, like the gold-covered Gospels of Lindau, were exported. This particular gem was bought by Lord Ashburnham, and in recent years has gone to America. Fine Gospels and other service-books from Weingarten are at Holkham; they appeal to the Englishman, for they contain pictures of our sainted King Oswald, of whom Weingarten owned a relic.

North Germany's contribution is far inferior to that of Bavaria and the Rhine provinces. The inhabitants of large regions were pagans till a late date (some might say they were so still), and have never, we conceive, been really civilized. Few books were made there before the fourteenth century, and I know of no good libraries that existed there in the medieval period. A good part of the contents of one at Elbing, near Dantzic, came somehow to Cambridge (Corpus Christi) in the seventeenth century; it is a dreary collection, mostly on paper, of scholastic theology, sermons, meditations, and a little medicine.

In Austria the abbeys were let alone till 1918. Such houses as Melk on the Danube, St. Florian, St. Paul in Carinthia, Admont in Styria, still owned their estates, their revenues, and their libraries. That of Melk is noticeable, and at St. Paul is, oddly enough, one of the very earliest Irish vernacular MSS. I believe it came thither in fairly recent times from St. Blasien in the Black Forest. But, on the whole, these places were too remote from the main stream to accumulate many treasures of the very first quality.

Latin MSS. in England

Let me now turn to England, and treat in greater detail of the monastic and cathedral libraries there, and what happened to them. The Dissolution, as we know, occurred here near on 400 years ago, which makes the task of tracing the books at once harder and more fascinating than in the case of France or Germany, where a whole library may be found practically intact in a town near its old home. Of course, what was done there ought to have been done here. Leland, the King's antiquary, the abusive Protestant, John Bale, and the foolish but learned Dr. John Dee, begged that it might be done. Yet, whatever Henry VIII's or Mary's or Elizabeth's intentions may have been at times as to the foundation of a "solempne library" where the ancient books of the realm might be stored, they got but a very little way. Leland did secure some MSS. for the Royal Library, perhaps most from Rochester, but upon the whole the work was left in Elizabeth's days to individual enthusiasts—Sir Robert Cotton, Archbishop Parker, and Dee and Bale themselves. Others who did good work were Henry Fitzalan, Earl of Arundel; Lord William Howard; Long Harry Savile of Bank; Laurence Nowell, who rescued Anglo-Saxon books; Nicholas Brigam, who was interested in English literature and built Chaucer's tomb in the Abbey; the Theyers of Brockworth, near Gloucester. These are names to some of which we shall return; it would be well at this moment to take a few libraries one by one and see what can be said of them.

Catalogues of MSS

But, first, what are our means for pursuing such an investigation? We are best off if we have a catalogue of our abbey library, and preferably a late one; for in that case not only will the library be at its fullest, but probably the cataloguer will have set down, after the title of each book, the first words of its second leaf. Does this need explanation? Perhaps. In MSS., unlike printed books, the first words of the second leaf will be different in any two copies, say, of the Bible; the scribes did not make a page for page or line for line copy of their archetype—in fact, they may probably have avoided doing so purposely. By the help of such a catalogue we can search through collections of MSS., noting the second leaves in each case, and, it may be, identifying a considerable number of books. It is a laborious but an interesting process.