University of Virginia Library

6. § VI

The intercourse of all these scholars with Italians was carried on before mid-fifteenth century. Their chief interest


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was in Latin books, although a large number of Greek manuscripts had been brought to Italy by Angeli da Scarparia, Guarino, Giovanni Aurispa, and Filelfo. After the fall of Constantinople the Greek immigrants introduced books into Italy much more freely. George Hermonymus of Sparta, a Greek teacher and copyist of Greek manuscripts, visited England on a papal mission in 1475, but whether he had any influence on our intellectual pursuits does not appear. [9.40] Certainly, however, English scholars soon appreciated this new literature.

Letters sent to Pope Sixtus in 1484 by the king, refer to the skill of John Shirwood, bishop of Durham, in Latin and Greek. [9.41] Shirwood seems to have collected a respectable library. His Latin books were acquired by Bishop Foxe, and formed the nucleus of the library with which the latter endowed Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Some thirty volumes, a number of them printed, now remain at the College to bring him to mind: among them we find Pliny, Terence, Cicero, Livy, Suetonius, Plutarch, and Horace. Less fortunate has been the fate of his Greek books, which went to the collegiate church of Bishop Auckland. At the end of the fifteenth century this church owned about forty volumes. The only exceptions to its medieval character were Cicero's Letters and Offices, Silius Italicus, and Theodore Gaza's Greek grammar.[9.42] But Leland tells us that Tunstall, who succeeded to the bishopric in 1530, found a store of Shirwood's Greek manuscripts at this church. What became of them we do not know.[9.43]

About this same time a certain Emmanuel of Constantinople seems to have been employed in England as a


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copyist. For Archbishop Neville he produced a Greek manuscript containing some sermones judiciales of Demosthenes, and letters of Aeschines, Plato, and Chion (1468).[9.44] Dr. Montague James has shown that this manuscript of Emmanuel is by the same hand as the manuscripts known as the "Ferrar group," which comprises "a Plato and Aristotle now at Durham, two psalters in Cambridge libraries, a psalter and part of a Suidas at Oxford, and the famous Leicester Codex of the Gospels." [9.45] Dr. James believes the Plato and the Aristotle to have been transcribed for Neville by Emmanuel. In 1472 the archbishop's household was broken up, and the "greete klerkys and famous doctors" of his entourage went to Cambridge. Among them, it is conjectured, was Emmanuel, and so it came to pass that three manuscripts in his writing have been at Cambridge; two psalters, as we have said, are there now, land in the beginning of the sixteenth century one of them, with the Leicester Codex, was certainly in the hands of the Grey Friars at Cambridge. This happy fruit of Dr. James' research throws a welcome ray of light on the pursuit of Greek studies in the last quarter of the fifteenth century.[9.46]

In view of all the hard things which have been said of the religious, it is significant to find them taking a leading part in bringing Greek studies to England. We cannot collate all the instances here, but a few may be brought together. Two Benedictines named William of Selling and William Hadley, some time warden of Canterbury College, Oxford, were in Italy studying and buying books for three years after 1464.[9.47] The former became distinguished for his aptitude in learning the ancient tongues, and


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consequently won the friendship of Angelo Poliziano. At least two other visits to Italy were made by him; the last being undertaken as an emissary of the king. On these occasions he got together as many Greek and Latin books as he could, and brought them—a large and precious store—to Canterbury.[9.48] For some reason the books were kept in the Prior's lodging instead of in the monastic library, and here they perished through the carelessness of Layton's myrmidons.[9.49] Among the books lost was possibly a copy of Cicero's Republic. Only five manuscripts have been found which can be connected with Selling's library: a fifteenth-century Greek Psalter, a copy of the Psalms in Hebrew and Latin, a Euripides, a Livy, and a magnificent Homer. [9.50] This; Homer we have already referred to in an earlier chapter, when describing the work of Theodore of Tarsus. The signature Θεοδωρος has now been more plausibly explained, "The following note," writes Dr. James, "which I found in Dr. Masters's copy of Stanley's Catalogue, preserved in [Corpus Christi] College Library, suggests another origin for this Homer. I have been unable to identify the document to which reference is made. It should obviously be a letter of an Italian humanist in the Harleian collection.... `Mem.: Humphrey Wanley, Librarian to the late Earl of Oxford, told Mr. Fran: Stanley, son of the author, a little before his death, that in looking over some papers in the papers in the Earl's library, he found a Letter from a learned Italian to his Friend in England, wherein he told him there was then a very stately Homer just transcribed for Theodorus
illustration[Description: A SCRIBE (ST. MARK WRITING HIS GOSPEL) FROM THE BEDFORD HOURS]

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Gaza, of whose Illumination he gives him a very particular description, which answer'd so exactly in every part to that here set forth, that he [Wanley] was fully perswaded it was this very Book, and y t the Θεοδωρος at the bottom of 1st page order'd to be placed there by Gaza as his own name, gave occasion to Abp. Parker to imagine it might have belonged to Theodore of Canterbury, which however Hody was of opinion could not be of that age.' Th. Gaza," continues Dr. James, "died in 1478; the suggestion here made is quite compatible with the hypothesis that Sellinge was the means of conveying the Homer to England, and does supply a rather welcome interpretation of the Θεοδωρος inscription." This reasonable hypothesis may be strengthened if we point out that Gaza was in Rome from 1464 to 1472, and Selling visited that city between 1464 and 1467 and again in 1469. Selling may have got the manuscript from Gaza on one of these occasions.

There is evidence of Greek studies at other monasteries, —at Westminster after 1465, when Millyng, an "able graecian," became prior at Reading in 1499 and 1500, and at Glastonbury during the time of Abbot Bere.[9.51]

But Canterbury's share was greatest Selling seems to have taught Greek at Christ Church. In the monastic school there Thomas Linacre was instructed, and probably got the rudiments of Greek from Selling himself. Thence Linacre went to Oxford, where he pursued Greek under Cornelius Vitelli, an Italian visitor acting as prælector in New College.[9.52] In 1485-6 Linacre went with his old master to Italy—his Sancta Mater Studiorum—where Selling seems to have introduced him to Poliziano. Linacre perfected his Greek pursuits under Chalcondylas, and


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became acquainted with Aldo Manuzio the famous printer, and Hermolaus Barbarus. A little story is told of his meeting with Hermolaus. He was reading a copy of Plato's Phaedo in the Vatican Library when the great humanist came up to him and said "the youth had no claim, as he had himself, to the title Barbarus, if it were lawful to judge from his choice of a book"—an incident which led to a great friendship between the two. Grocyn and Latimer were with Linacre in Rome. The former was the first to carry on effectively the teaching of Greek begun at Oxford possibly by Vitelli; but he was nevertheless a conservative scholar, well read in the medieval schoolmen, as his library clearly proves. This library is of interest because one hundred and five of the one hundred and twenty-one books in it were printed. The manuscript age is well past, and the costliness of books, the chief obstacle to the dissemination of thought, was soon to give no cause for remark.