University of Virginia Library

1. § I

AFTER a storm a fringe of weed and driftwood stretches a serried line along the sands, and now and then—too often on the flat shores of one of our northern estuaries, whence can be seen the white teeth of the sea biting at the shoals flanking the fairway—are mingled with the flotsam sodden relics of life aboard ship and driftwood of tell-tale shape, which silently point to a tragedy of the sea. Usually the daily paper completes the tale; but on some rare occasion these poor bits of drift remain the only evidence of the vain struggle, and from them we must piece together the narrative as best we can. And as the sea does not give up everything, nor all at once, some wreckage sinking, or perishing, or floating upon the water a long time before finding a well-concealed hiding-place upon some unfrequented shore, so the past yields but a fraction of its records, and that

fraction slowly and grudgingly. So far this book has been a gathering of the flotsam of a past age: odd relics and scattered records, a sign here and a hint there; often unrelated, sometimes contradictory. In more skilful hands possibly a coherent story might be wrought out of these pièces justificatives; but the author is too well aware of the difficulty of arranging and selecting from the mass of material, remembers too well the tale of mistakes thankfully avoided, and is too apprehensive that other errors lurk undiscovered, to be confident that he has succeeded in his aim. Whether the story is worth telling is another matter. Surely it is. To be able to follow the history of the Middle Ages, to become acquainted with the people, their mode of life and customs and manners, is of profound interest and great utility; and it is by no means the least important part of such study to discover what books they had, how extensively the books were read, and what section of the people read them.

Let us here sum up the information given in detail in the foregoing pages; adding thereto some other facts of interest. And first, what of the character of the medieval library?

During the earlier centuries monastic libraries contained books which were deemed necessary for grammatical study in the claustral schools, and other books, chiefly the Fathers, as we have seen, which were regarded as proper literature for the monk. The books used in the cathedral schools were similar. Such schools and such libraries were for the glory of God and the increase of clergy and religious. At first, especially, the ideal of the monks was high, if narrow. It is epitomised in the untranslatable epigram Claustrum sine armario (est) quasi castrum sine armamentario.[11.2] "The library is the

monastery's true treasure," writes Thomas a Kempis; [11.3] "without which the monastery is like . . . a well without water . . . an unwatched tower." Again: "Let not the toil and fatigue pain you. They who read the books formerly written beautifully by you will pray for you when you are dead. And if he who gives a cup of cold water shall not lack his guerdon, still less shall he who gives the living water of wisdom lose his reward in heaven." [11.4] St. Bernard wrote in like terms. Books were their tools, "the silent preachers of the divine word," or the weapons of their armoury. "Thence it is," writes a sub-prior to his friend, "that we bring forth the sentences of the divine law, like sharp arrows, to attack the enemy. Thence we take the armour of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, the shield of faith, and the sword of the Spirit which is the Word of God."[11.5] With such an end in view Reculfus of Soissons required his clergy to have a missal, a lectionary, the Gospels, a martyrology, an antiphonary, a psalter, a book of forty homilies of Gregory, and as many Christian books as they could get (879). With this end in view were chosen for reading in the Refectory at Durham (1395) such books as the Bible, homilies, Legends of the Saints, lives of Gregory, Martin, Nicholas, Dunstan, Augustine, Cuthbert, King Oswald, Aidan, Thomas of Canterbury, and other saints.[11.6] With this end in view the monastic libraries contained a very large proportion of Bibles, books of the Bible, and commentaries —a proportion suggesting the Scriptures were studied with a closeness and assiduity for which the monks have not always received due credit. [11.7] A great deal of room was given up to the works of the Fathers—their confessions, retractations, and letters, their polemics against heresies, their dogmatic and doctrinal treatises, and their sermons and ethical discourses. Of all these writings those of Hilary, Basil, Ambrose, Chrysostom, Jerome, and the great Augustine were most popular. John Cassian, Leo, Prosper, Cassiodorus, Gregory the Great, Aldhelm, Bede, Anselm, and Bernard, and the two encyclopædists, Martianus Capella and Isidore of Seville, were the church's great teachers, and their works and the sacred poetry and hymns of Juvencus the Spanish priest, of Prudentius, of Sedulius, the author of a widely-read and influential poem on the life of Christ, and of Fortunatus, were nearly always well represented in the monastic catalogues, as may be seen on a cursory examination of those of Christ Church and St. Augustine's, Canterbury, of Durham, of Glastonbury in 1248, of Peterborough in 1400, and of Syon in the sixteenth century. In the earlier libraries the greater part of the books were Scriptural and theological; to these were added later a mass of books on canon and civil law; so that the monastic collection may be characterised as almost entirely special and fit for Christian service, as this service was conceived by the religious.

And classical literature was received into the fold for a like purpose. From the earliest days of Christendom prejudice against the classics was widespread among Christians. Such books, it was urged, had no connexion with the Church or the Gospel; Ciceronianism was not the road to God; Plato and Aristotle could not show the way to happiness; Ovid, above all, was to be avoided.[11.8] In dreams the poets took the form of demons; they must be exorcised, for the soul did not profit by them. The precepts —and for these the Christian sought—in the poems were

like serpents, born of the evil one; the characters, devils. Some Christians sighed as they thrust the tempting books away. Jerome frankly confesses he cared little for the homely Latin of the Psalms, and much for Plautus and Cicero. For a time he renounced them with other vanities of the world; yet when going through the catacombs at Rome, where the Apostles and Martyrs had their graves, a fine line of Virgil thrills him; and later he instructed boys at Bethlehem in Plautus, Terence, and Virgil, much to the horror of Rufinus. Even in the eleventh century this feeling existed. Lanfranc wrote to Dumnoaldus to say it was unbefitting he should study such books, but he confessed that although he now renounced them, he had read them a good deal in his youth. Somewhat later Herbert "Losinga," abbot of Ramsey, had a dream which led him to cease reading and imitating Virgil and Ovid; but elsewhere he recommends his pupils to accept Ovid as a model in Latin verse, while he quotes the Tristia.[11.9] The rules of some orders, as those of Isidore, St. Francis, and St. Dominic, forbade the reading of the classics, save by permission. For their value in teaching grammar and as models of literary style, however, certain classic authors— especially Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, and Statius —were regarded as supplementary to the grammatical works of Donatus, Victorinus, Macroblus, and Priscian, and were studied by the religious throughout the Middle Ages. They were grammatical text-books, as indeed they are still; but then they were very little else. A man would call himself Virgil, not from inordinate vanity, but from a naive pride in his profession of grammarian: to his way of thinking the great poet was no more.[11.10] "As decade followed decade," writes Mr. H. O. Taylor, "and century followed century, there was no falling off in the study of the Æneid. Virgil's fame towered, his authority became absolute. But how? In what respect? As a supreme master of grammatical correctness and rhetorical excellence and of all learning. With increasing emptiness of soul, the grammarians—the `Virgils'—of the succeeding centuries put the great poet to ever baser uses."[11.11]

From time to time the use of the classics even for grammatical purposes was condemned, though unavailingly. They were necessary in the schools; evils, doubtless, but unavoidable. Then, again, some of the classics were looked upon as allegorical: from the sixth century to the Renascence the Æneid was often interpreted in this way; and Virgil's Fourth Eclogue was thought to be a prophecy of Christ's coming. Ovid allegorised contained profound truths; his Art of Love, so treated, was not unfit for nuns. [11.12] Other writers, as Lucan, were appreciated for their didacticism; Juvenal, Cato and Seneca the younger as moralists. And some of the religious fell a prey to these evils, inasmuch as they assessed them at their true value as literature.

The classics therefore were accepted. Anselm recommended Virgil. Horace, in his most amorous moods, was sung by the monks. Ovid, either adapted or in his natural state, was a great favourite. In an appendix we have scheduled the chief classics found in English monastic catalogues to indicate roughly the extent to which they were collected and used. A glance at Becker's sheaf of catalogues will show us that Aristotle, Horace, Juvenal, Lucan, Persius, Plato, Pliny the elder, Porphyry, Sallust, Statius, Terence, and especially Cicero, Ovid, Seneca, and Virgil are well represented. But it must not be supposed that they were in monastic libraries in excessive numbers. On the contrary. An inspection of almost any catalogue of

such a library will prove that only a small proportion of it consisted of classical writings, especially in those catalogues compiled prior to the time when Aristotle's works dominated the whole of medieval scholarship. The monastic library was throughout the Middle Ages the armoury of the religious against evil, and the few slight changes of character which it underwent at one time and another do not alter the fact that on the whole it was a fit and proper collection for its purpose.[11.13]