No More Learning

The central fact is that
at the beginning of the eighth century England was the home of the
one great writer of the time, and was a source of light to the whole of
the West. In Bede's Ecclesiastical History we have a book of real
literary excellence, as well as an invaluable historical source. In his
other works, some of which have outlived their period of greatest
usefulness, especially his commentaries, he provided sources of infor-
mation which were at once welcomed as superior to anything then
available, and which retained their popularity until the thirteenth
century at least? .
The lifetime of Bede tides over the first third of the eighth century.
The last third sees the beginning of the Carolingian Renaissance. The
middle third, compared with its neighbours, is a barren time so far as
regards the production of writings of abiding value.
Indeed, when one has named Boniface, with the small group of
English writers who were his contemporaries, and Virgilius of Salzburg,
almost all is said. Boniface and his circle bear witness, in their letters
Ceolfrid gave to King Aldfrid in exchange for some lands. (Bede, Vitae Abbatum, 15. )
This may possibly have been the Christian Topography of Cosmas Indicopleustes,
from which we undoubtedly find an excerpt in Latin in a manuscript given by King
Aethelstan to the see of St Cuthbert (CCCC. 183).
1 See also Vol. 11. p. 574.
CH. XIX.


## p. 512 (#558) ############################################

512
Wanaerings of Manuscripts
99
and in their poems, to the sound learning imparted in the great English
schools. What they wrote has some flavour of the elaboration charac-
teristic of Aldhelm as distinguished from Bede. The acrostic and the
riddle are in favour: Boniface even copies, in his verses to Duddus,
the “figured” poem of Publilius Optatianus, in which certain letters
picked out of the lines form a pattern or picture, and also compose
distinct lines or sentences. It is more to the purpose however to draw
attention to the frequent requests for books which Boniface prefers to
his friends in England, the fruit of which we may perhaps see now in
some of the small but precious group of manuscripts still preserved at
Fulda. Among the treasures of the Würzburg library too are books
with English connexions: in one is mention of a Worcester abbess? .
The presence of others may be due to the Irish missionary and martyr
Kilian († 689), among them the unique copy of the works of the heretic
Priscillian, or, as Dom Morin now inclines to think, of his companion
Instantius. It is thought, I may add, that the Graeco-Latin Codex
Laudianus of the Acts has made the journey between Britain and the
Continent twice. First brought to England by Theodore and Hadrian,
and there used by Bede, it travelled to Germany with some members
of the Bonifacian circle, and found a home there till the seventeenth
century, when a second Archbishop of Canterbury, Laud, was instru-
mental in bringing it once again to this country along with many other
spoils of German libraries.
It will eventually be possible, thanks to the work of the great palaeo-
graphers of our own time, to write a history of the transmission of ancient
literature, and to trace its influence upon individual authors of the early
Middle Ages by the help of our rapidly growing knowledge of the styles
of writing peculiar to the great centres of learning, monastic and other,
and by the indications, which single manuscripts are gradually being
induced to yield, of their own parentage and wanderings. But the time
for attempting this is not yet: many monographs have to be written
and multitudinous details correlated, and the reader of a survey such
as this must be content to be told that the cloud which hangs over the
literary life of the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries is in process of
being thinned : it is beyond hope that it can be wholly dispersed.
One other name demands notice before we close our review of pre-
Carolingian literature. Virgilius, Bishop of Salzburg, has made a con-
siderable figure in many a text-book in the capacity of an enlightened
cosmographer; or of an early martyr of science, persecuted and silenced
by clerical obscurantists because of his belief in the Antipodes. We
have not a line of his writing: our only life of him makes no allusion
to his secular learning : all that we know of this side of him is confined
to a couple of lines in a letter of Pope Zacharias to St Boniface, and to
1 The MS. is of Jerome on Ecclesiastes (cent. vi): the owner was Abbess Cuth-
suuitha (690-700).
а


## p. 513 (#559) ############################################

Virgilius of Salzburg
513
the epithets Geometer and Solivagus' which were applied to him, the
former by the Annals of the Four Masters when recording his death,
the other by an authority as yet untraced. Pope Zacharias, answering
a complaint of Boniface, says, “ with regard to the perverse and wicked
doctrine which he has spoken, against God and his own soul; if it be
made clear that he admits it,—that there is another world and other
men, or sun and moon, beneath the earth (sub terra)—you must hold
a council, deprive him of priestly rank, and expel him from the Church. "
This brief and rough characterisation has been made to bear the interpre-
tation that Virgilius had published a philosophical treatise setting forth
the view that there are Antipodes, possibly in dependence upon Martianus
Capella's teaching. Or, it is put more modestly that he had given
expression to this view in his lectures. It will be seen that the words
of Zacharias contain nothing to support (and nothing to bar) this
explanation. Another has been advanced which has never become
fashionable, but which, I think, deserves to be weighed. It is that
Virgilius had in his mind not Antipodes, but dwellers below the surface
of the earth. In the twelfth century, as William of Newburgh tells us, a
green boy and girl appeared at Woolpit in Suffolk, who were members
of an underground race. They called their world the land of St Martin
(perhaps Merlin was the real name) and told how it was lighted—not, it
is true, by another sun and moon, and how it was a Christian land and
had churches. Any one who has read much of Scandinavian or Celtic
fairy-lore will realise that the beliefs he finds there about the under-
ground people are just such as could be described by Pope Zacharias's
phrase. Were it not for the epithet Geometer, which does seem to
imply an interest in science, I should be strongly inclined to give the
preference to this second explanation of Virgilius's erroneous doctrine.
1 It seems to have been assumed that the word is connected with Sol: but does it
in fact mean more than “the lone wanderer"?
C. MED. H. VOL. III. CH. XIX.
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514
CHAPTER XX.
LEARNING AND LITERATURE TILL POPE SYLVESTER II.
Only a few years before the death of Bede, Alcuin was born, and in
Alcuin we have the principal link between the vigorous learning of these
islands and that, hardly yet born, of Central Europe. The main facts of
the connexion are familiar. Alcuin, educated in the traditions of York,
left England at about the age of fifty, on a mission to Rome to receive
the archiepiscopal pall for Eanbald of York, and in 781 met Charlemagne
at Parma and was invited by him to come to his court as soon as his
errand should be accomplished. With the exception of one interval
spent in England, the rest of Alcuin's life was passed on the Continent.
It ended in 804.
Meanwhile England had begun to be the prey of Danish invasion.
Exactly when the library of York, which Alcuin describes so glowingly
in an often-quoted passage of his poem on the Saints of the Church of
York, was destroyed, we do not know; but that this was a time of de-
struction, that a whole literature in the English vernacular was wiped
out, and that the stores of ancient learning, accumulated in the North by
Benedict Biscop and in the South by Theodore and Hadrian, were
scattered, is certain. Only waifs and strays remain to attest the height
which art and learning had attained here, and the value of the treasures
that had been imported. The Lindisfarne Gospels and the Ruthwell
Cross on the one hand, and the Codex Amiatinus (happily retrieved by
its parent country before the catastrophe) on the other, are outstanding
examples.
Between the departure of Alcuin for the Emperor's court and the
revival of English letters under Alfred, England, disunited and ravaged,
makes no contribution to the cause of learning.
Interest is centred upon that same court of Charlemagne. Here for
a time lived Paul the Deacon and Peter of Pisa, both representatives of
Italy, where learning, if inert, was not dead. Incomparably the more
important figure of the two is that of Paul, chiefly in view of two pieces
of work, his abridgment of the Glossary of Pompeius Festus, and his
History of the Lombards. Both are precious, not for style, but for the


## p. 515 (#561) ############################################

Paul the Deacon
515
а
hard facts which they preserve. About half of the glossary of Festus,
itself an abridgment of the work of Verrius Flaccus, has survived only in
a sadly damaged Naples manuscript: without it, and what Paul has
rescued of the remainder, our knowledge of archaic Latin would be far
fuller of gaps than it is. His epitome was a mine, too, for later writers,
who drew from it strange forms to adorn their pages. In virtue of his
other great work, Paul has earned the name of the Father of Italian
history. Neither of these books was written at the instance of the
Emperor, who employed Paul in educational work and in the compilation
of a set of Homilies for use in church.
Paul was something of a verse-writer, and some fables of his are by
-
no means without merit; but both he and Peter were chiefly valued by
their patron as teachers of grammar. We have writings of both of them
on this subject, a subject touched by almost every one of the great
scholars of the period we have been and shall be reviewing; Aldhelm,
Bede, Boniface, Alcuin, not to mention a crowd of minor names, Irish
and Continental. Especially in the Carolingian age, when serious efforts
were afoot to raise the standard of education, were grammatical manuals
of frequent occurrence. Their compilers used the works of recent pre-
decessors and of more ancient writers in varying degrees, commonly
contributing little of their own, save perhaps the order and arrangement
of the material". No detailed review of these writers will be atteinpted
in this chapter ; but they deserve mention, and honourable mention,
since they ministered to the first needs of a fresh and very numerous
generation of scholars.
In leaving Paul the Deacon, it is worth while to remark that he
expressly disclaims knowledge of Greek (and Hebrew), and to note that
Greek does not figure very conspicuously in the works of most of the
important scholars in Charlemagne's own circle, though we can see that
it was known to more than one of them. There
may
have been some
few Greek books accessible to them: between 758 and 763 Pope Paul I
had sent some to Pepin; "the grammar of Aristotle, of Dionysius the
Areopagite; a geometry, an orthography ” says the Pope, obscurely
enough. But we do not fall on the track of these again.
The knowledge that Charlemagne revived education and learning in
his empire is common property. I shall not dwell upon his methods,
but rather upon the individual men whom he gathered about him to do
the work, and upon the results they achieved. Three have already been
mentioned, and I do not think it is insular prejudice which inclines me
to regard Alcuin as the central figure.
He was not a great writer: interesting as are his letters and his
poems, none of them can be rated high as literature. But as an organizer
and administrator, and as a personally attractive man, he stands in the
1 Smaragdus of St Mihiel (c. 820) takes illustrations from the vernacular, an
interesting point.
CH, XX.
33-2


## p. 516 (#562) ############################################

516
Alcuin
first rank. Socially we can see that he must have been very acceptable ;
in the common phrase of to-day, he had a genius for friendship. In
promoting the revival of education he had this advantage over his
helpers, that alone among them he was possessed of the traditions and
methods of a long-established and thriving school.
The mass of writing for which he is responsible is very large. There
are Biblical commentaries, not more distinguished for originality than
those of Bede: treatises upon the Adoptionist heresy which sprang up in
his time in Spain, and upon the Trinity, accounted his best theological
work. There is a liturgical corpus, of great importance in the history
of worship, of which a Homiliary, a Lectionary, and a Sacramentary are
the chief members. Of a revision of the text of the Latin Bible due to
him there is a constant tradition which we need not doubt, though we
possess no record of the imperial order under which it is said to have
been undertaken, and there are few allusions to it in Alcuin's own
writings. Moreover, the task of distinguishing the Alcuinian text from
other current types is beset with difficulties. There is also a series of
educational manuals: we have those on Grammar, Rhetoric, and Dialectic,
and there seem to have been others. They were not popular for long,
and were not intrinsically very valuable. Still, they were pioneer work,
and as such they doubtless had an influence not to be despised.
As to his own range of reading, apart from the theology which
ranked as standard in his time, something must be said. The mass of
verse which we have from him shews his knowledge of such authors as
Virgil—some study of whom may be assumed in the case of everyone
with whom we shall be concerned-Statius, Lucan, and of the Christian
poets Juvencus, Prudentius, Arator, Sedulius and others who, like Virgil,
were read by all who read at all. His list of the writers who were to be
found in the library at York is instructive though incomplete (it omits,
for example, Isidore); but it contains few names which ceased to be
familiar in later centuries. Of theologians, Victorinus and Lactantius, ,
of poets, Alcimus Avitus, of grammarians Probus, Focas, Euticius
Pompeius, Cominianus, are those who became comparative rarities in
and after the twelfth century. The most learned of Alcuin's letters are
those that relate to astronomy, in which the Emperor was interested.
In one of them he asks for a copy of Pliny's Natural History to help
him to answer certain queries, and elsewhere in his correspondence he
quotes Vitruvius and alludes to Dares Phrygius as if he knew the Trojan
History current under that name. He is also credited with the intro-
duction of a few texts to the Continent—the spurious correspondences of
Alexander the Great with Dindimus, king of the Brachmani, and of
St Paul with Seneca. If not very important, both of these became
excessively popular: more so than the Categoriae of Augustine, the
transmission of which is also due to Alcuin.
His knowledge of Greek is a matter of controversy, but at least
a


## p. 517 (#563) ############################################

The Carolingian Minuscule
517
he can quote the Psalter and the Epistles to elucidate a point of
grammar.
A A remark may be permitted here which is applicable to most of the
individual cases we shall meet. Those who had learnt the grammar
and
machinery of the Greek language were not few in number (and I see no
reason for excluding Alcuin's name from the list), but when they had
learnt it and were in a position to use Greek books, there were no Greek
books for them to use. Literally, as we shall see, hardly any beyond
a few copies of parts of the Bible—Psalter, Gospels, Epistles. In other
words, there was very little matter which they did not already possess in
a form easier to be used and considered equally authoritative. Hence
the study was unpopular; it involved great labour, and had little to
offer save to those who coveted abstruse learning and took pleasure in
the process of acquiring it,
of acquiring it. For all that, the tradition of the supreme
excellence of Greek learning was slow to die; and in every generation
some individuals were attracted by it, though the difficulties they had
to encounter increased as time went on.
Alcuin's abbey of St Martin at Tours played a great part in the
diffusion of that form of writing, the Carolingian minuscule, which was
the vehicle of transmission of the main bulk of the ancient literature.
Obscured for a time-ousted, indeed-by the Gothic scripts of the later
Middle Ages, it emerged again at the revival of learning, took perhaps
a more refined shape at the hands of the humanists, and became the
parent of the common “Roman " type in which these lines will be read.
That the introduction of this clear and beautiful script is one of the
most remarkable and beneficial of the reforms of Charlemagne's age,
whoever has had to do with Merovingian, Beneventan, or Visigothic
hands will readily allow. It would be pleasant if we could point to it
as an enduring trace of the influence of Alcuin, as has been commonly
done. The trend of expert opinion, however, is against this attribution.
The traditions of writing in which Alcuin was brought up were insular,
and so good an authority as Traube pronounces that the great Anglo-
Saxon scholar had no share in forming the hand of the scriptorium of
Tours.
The pupils of Alcuin did not fail to follow his methods and to pro-
pagate sound learning to the best of their ability. We shall revert to
them and their work. It is now time to leave the great teacher and to
notice a few other leading members of the court circle.
Einhard, Theodulf, and Angilbert are three figures of great interest.
The Vita Karoli of the first may be unhesitatingly named as the best
piece of literature which the Carolingian revival produced. As is well
known, it follows the lines of an ancient model, Suetonius's Lives of the
Caesars, and especially that of Augustus. A copy of Suetonius, the
parent, it seems, of all that we have, was at Fulda : Servatus Lupus of
Ferrières writes for a transcript of it in later years. This MS Einhard
CH, XX.


## p. 518 (#564) ############################################

518
Einhard; Theodulf
must have studied closely and wisely; from it he derives the plan and pro-
portions, and the method of narration, in his biography. Succinct, clear,
and picturesque, inspired with a sagacious perception of the greatness of
its subject, it is a really worthy monument to the Emperor. “Nardulus”
is an attractive personality as revealed in this work, and in the letters
and poems of his friends. His own letters are rather jejune business-
documents for the most part. A mention of Vitruvius is almost the
A
only detail of literary interest ; there is evidence, besides, of acquaintance
with the letters of Pliny, and, elsewhere, with the Germania of Tacitus.
More characteristic than the correspondence is his narrative of the
translation or theft of the relics of SS. Marcellinus and Peter, which he
procured from Rome for his abbey of Michelstadt. It is the classical
instance of these pious conveyances, and an early one in the series. Of
the documents which throw light upon Einhard's personality and his
domestic relations, the best are the letters of condolence written to him
by Servatus Lupus on the death of his wife. That Einhard took part
in the compilation of the very valuable Lorsch annals—anonymous, as is
the rule with that class of records—has been denied, but is affirmed by
weighty opinion. His poems, and his lost work on the Saxons, can have
,
no more than a bare mention here.
Theodulf, Spaniard by birth and education, ecclesiastic and statesman,
Bishop of Orleans and Abbot of Fleury, stands out as by far the most
skilful versifier-I think I would say poet-of his time. He has an
astonishing facility in the elegiac metre. A very large mass of his
writing has survived, though the only manuscript of the longer poems
has disappeared since Sirmond printed them. If one were asked to
single out the most successful piece, perhaps that addressed To Judges
has the strongest claim. In this he describes an official journey of
inspection which he took with Leidrad (afterwards Archbishop of Lyons)
through Gallia Narbonensis. At one place he introduces an incident
which is rather characteristic of his manner. Some one who wishes to
curry favour with him calls him aside and offers him a piece of plate,
evidently of antique workmanship: it is worn with age, and has in the
centre a representation of Hercules and Cacus surrounded with others
which shew Hercules and the snakes and the Twelve Labours : on the
outside are the fight with Nessus and the deaths of Lichas and Hercules,
as well as the story of Antaeus. Other suitors proffer Eastern fabrics
with beasts woven upon them, and so forth. I call this characteristic,
for we find several similar descriptions of works of art in the poems, as,
for example, the Seven Liberal Arts depicted on a dish, and a picture,
designed by Theodulf himself, of the Earth in the form of a woman
suckling a child, and surrounded by many symbolic attributes. These
things are interesting in themselves and as affording evidence of the
survival of classical traditions and monuments.
Another ingenuity in which he evidently took pleasure, is the intro-
:


## p. 519 (#565) ############################################

Theodulf; Angilbert
519
7
duction of place-names in large numbers. Many distichs are made up
of these: here is one enumerating some of the rivers which watered
Charlemagne's dominions :
Rura Mosella Liger Vulturnus Matrona Ledus
Hister Atax Gabarus Olitis Albis Arar.
He does not even shun Bagdad :
Si veniat Bagatat, Agarenis rebus onusta.
As amusing as any is his poem on the court (xxv), where he tells
how Nardus (Einhard), Erkambald, and Osulf might serve (being all of
a size, and that not great) as the three legs of a table, and how, when
a
the poem is read aloud, a wretched Scot (possibly Clement the Irishman,
the palace schoolmaster) will be in a miserable state of temper and
confusion.
Two pieces of his verse, and only two, were at all commonly copied
in later centuries : an extract from his Preface to the Bible finds a place
in some thirteenth century Vulgates, and a part of his Palm Sunday
hymn, “Gloria, laus, et honor," remains in use in the original and in
vernacular versions.
What has been said of his facility in the writing of elegiac verse
implies his close study of older models, particularly of Ovid. His com-
patriot Prudentius was also a well-read source. But on the whole his
range of classical reading does not comprise unfamiliar names. We do
not learn much from him about the preservation of ancient literature.
A word in conclusion as to his work on the revision of the text of
the Bible. That he undertook a recension of it is not to be doubted,
and it is generally agreed that we have, at Le Puy and at Paris (B. N.
Lat. 9380), two copies, more or less faithful, of that recension. That he
made it by the help of old Spanish manuscripts is also the prevailing
view: it is probable enough that fragments of some of these survive at
Orleans, whither they came from his abbey, Fleury. But neither was it
a very remarkable piece of work in itself, nor did it exercise upon the
history of the text an influence approaching that attributed to the
contemporary Alcuinian revision.
Angilbert-Homer, as he was called—influential as he was personally,
takes on the whole a secondary place among the writers. If the fragment
of an epic poem on Charlemagne and Pope Leo, which contains a cele-
brated description of the Emperor and his family out hunting, be not
his (but it probably is) there is not much to preserve his name as an
author. But as Abbot of St Riquier he was zealous in collecting books
-over 200 of them-for his monastery, and, if we may judge by the
names of authors whom Mico had at disposal, there was a strong con-
tingent of Latin poets amongst them.
1 Roer, Moselle, Loire, Volturno, Marne, Lès near Montpellier, Danube, Aude,
Gave, Lot, Elbe, Saone. This characteristic reappears in the German Renaissance.
-
CH. XX.


## p. 520 (#566) ############################################

520
Agobard; Raban Maur
Only a systematic history of literature could undertake to name the
minor figures of this or of subsequent periods. It must suffice here to
select a few men and books that stand out from a crowd which begins
to thicken rapidly.
Alcuin, dying in 804, was the first after Paul the Deacon to disappear.
Einhard and the rest were considerably younger men, and Einhard lived
till 840. Before we take up the direct line of succession to Alcuin, we
will devote a few words to one who stood outside the circle that has
been engaging our attention, and who was just about coeval with
Einhard. This is Agobard, Archbishop of Lyons (769–840). Like
Theodulf he was a Spaniard. It is no part of my purpose to trace his
career or catalogue his many tracts: three points only shall be noted as
germane to the subject of this chapter. First, he was instrumental in
preserving, in a manuscript which he gave to a church at Lyons, and
which is now at Paris, a very large proportion of the extant works of
Tertullian. Next, though he shews no interest in classical learning, it
is curious to find that he had some knowledge of Jewish lore. In his
fierce attack on the Jews he quotes Rabbinic teaching about the seven
heavens, and also some form of the Jewish libel on our Lord which is
commonly called the Toledoth Jesu. Lastly, two of his tracts have
a bearing on folklore: one of them denounces the current belief in
Tempestarii, people who could produce storms at will: the other tells of
a mysterious epidemic which had induced people in the district of Uzès
to revert to pagan observances. These, two of which are no doubt small
matters, are samples of the odds and ends of strange information which
may be picked up from the literature of the time.
The most influential of the diadochi of Alcuin was perhaps his pupil
Magnentius Hrabanus Maurus (Raban) (784–856), Abbot of Fulda for
twenty years (822–842) and from 847 Archbishop of Mayence. He was no
original genius, but a great channel of learning, which he transmitted
through compilations in the form of commentaries and of an encyclopaedia
founded on Isidore. The achievement which his contemporaries admired
most was his book In Praise of the Holy Cross. This too is closely modelled
on an older book, the panegyric on Constantine by Publilius Optatianus
Porphyrius. Pages of capital letters in which some are picked out in
red, meet the eye, and it is realised that the red letters not only have
their proper part in the text, but also form some device or picture, and
that they make up some sentiment or verse independently. Such carmina
figurata, of terrible ingenuity and infinitesimal value, were popular
throughout these centuries.
Raban Maur not only found a precious library at Fulda, but in-
creased it substantially. It can have had few rivals in quality by the
time he left it. To Fulda we owe, it appears, the preservation of Sue-
tonius, of Tacitus, of Ammianus Marcellinus, to name three leading
examples: it has been shewn, too, that Raban had access to Lucretius.
0


## p. 521 (#567) ############################################

Monastic libraries
521
The mention of this library affords an occasion for speaking, though
in the briefest terms, of the others which competed with it on the Con-
tinent: Lorsch, Reichenau near Constance, St Gall, Corbie in Picardy,
St Riquier, Fleury on the Loire, Bobbio and Monte Cassino in Italy.
These, I imagine, are all indisputably to be placed in the first class. Of
them be it remembered that Fulda, Reichenau, St Gall, and Bobbio owe
their being to these islands : Boniface, Pirminius, Gallus, Columban were
their founders. How much further our list should stretch no two people
would agree; but it would be absurd to omit the libraries of Tours,
Rheims, St Denis, Mayence, Cologne, Trèves, Corvey in Westphalia
(daughter of Corbie), Würzburg, Laon, Liège; or that of Verona,
to which the archdeacon Pacificus (7 846) added more than 200 volumes.
Each of these had its importance as school or storehouse, and some,
like St Gall, Würzburg, and Verona, have kept together a surprisingly
large proportion of their ancient possessions up to the present day.
Not so all those which were first named. The books of Fulda, of
which we have a catalogue, made late in the sixteenth century, have very
largely disappeared. Lorsch is better represented, in the libraries of
the Vatican and elsewhere, Reichenau at Carlsruhe, Corbie at Paris,
Petrograd, and Amiens, Fleury at Rome and Orleans, Bobbio at Rome,
Milan, Turin, Vienna and Bamberg.
Among them these houses produced a great proportion of the ninth
century manuscripts which exist to-day, and anyone who will be at the
pains to examine Chatelain's Paléographie des Classiques Latins or
Sabbadini's account of the rediscovery of the classics at the Renaissance
will realise how much of what we have is due to the scribes who lived
between, say, 800 and 950.
There are three Latin authors of the first class, Virgil, Terence, and
Livy, of whom the whole or a considerable portion have survived in
manuscripts of the classical period. Neglecting fragments, it may be
,
said that the earliest copies of Caesar, Sallust, Lucretius, Juvenal,
Persius, both Plinies, Tacitus, Lucan, Suetonius, Martial, the greater
part of Cicero, all date from the Carolingian Renaissance. There is, of
course, something to be set against this immense debt: what, we ask,
has become of the archetypes which the scribes of the ninth century
used ? It is to be feared that, once transcribed, they were cast aside as
old and useless', and few of them allowed to live on even as palimpsests,
for vellum was not so scarce as it had been. Still, the fact remains that
they were copied, and that in such numbers as attest a vivid and wide-
spread interest in the best literature that was accessible.
In Walafrid(Walahfridus) Straboor Strabus, the pupil of Raban Maur,
we have another scholar of the direct Alcuinian succession.
His career
was not a long one (808–849), but the amount, and in some respects the
1 There was some excuse for this. Books written in short lines, in capital
letters, with the words undivided, cannot be read with ease or comfort.
CH. XX.


## p. 522 (#568) ############################################

522
Walafrid Strabo
quality of his work, is remarkable. The Glossa Ordinaria, an abridgment
of patristic commentaries on all the books of the Bible, a predecessor of
the Synopsis Criticorum of more modern times, was his great monument.
In the twelfth century no monastic library of any consideration lacked
a set, and even the smallest owned a few of the principal volumes. It is
no more than a compilation, from sources which still exist, but it was
a source of primary importance to students of the Bible for many years.
Walafrid's poetry is more interesting to us than the gloss. There
is a good deal of it, but only two pieces shall be selected for special
mention. De imagine Tetrici is notable for its subject (which is the
equestrian statue of Theodoric removed from Ravenna to Aix-la-Chapelle
by Charlemagne in 801), and also for its form ; it is a dialogue between
the poet and Scintilla (roughly, his genius), which is succeeded by a re-
markable description of the Emperor Louis the Pious and his train. De
cultura hortorum is the first of medieval Georgics. Those who have seen
it will at least remember the epilogue, addressed to Grimaldus of St Gall,
in which Walafrid says: “Think of me when you are sitting in your
walled garden under the shade of a peach tree.
Dum tibi cana legunt tenera lanugine poma
Ludentes pueri, scola laetabunda tuorum,
Atque volis ingentia mala capacibus indunt
Grandia conantes includere corpora palmis. "
The lines are not "great poetry," but the picture is pleasant.
A group of three writers whose works bear on the preservation of
Roman literature shall next be noticed.
The first part of the ninth century (805-862) is covered by the life
of Servatus Lupus, Abbot of Ferrières, whose letters, not uncelebrated,
are by far the most remarkable of his writings. The frequent requests
he makes for books, and especially classical books, have long since at-
tracted attention. From Einhard he borrows Aulus Gellius and the
rhetorical works of Cicero; from Altsig of York, Quintilian; from
another he tries to get Livy; from the Abbot of Fulda, Suetonius in
two small volumes. He owns and has read Caesar; he quotes Horace, and
may have had some other Latin lyrics. A line which he cites as Horace's,
(Meos dividerem libenter annos), is not to be found in Horace now.
Mico of St Riquier seems to have compiled his work on prosody
about the year 825.
825. It is a collection, arranged alphabetically, of lines
from upwards of thirty poets, pagan and Christian, exemplifying the
scansion of particular words, the name of the source being written beside
each. One could hardly have a more convenient key to the contents of
the St Riquier library as regards Latin verse. The list need not be set
out in full here, but a few remarks may be made. The Aratea both of
Cicero and of Germanicus and the medical poem of Q. Serenus Sam-
monicus, to which Lucretius may be added, count as rarities. We miss
Calpurnius and Nemesianus, who were known to the Carolingian court, and
а


## p. 523 (#569) ############################################

Classical knowledge; Spain
523
Macer-perhaps last mentioned as extant by Ermoldus Nigellus, a notable
court-poet. The absence of Catullus, Tibullus and Propertius is not sur-
prising; the first and last evidently did not emerge till a good deal later:
Tibullus, however, does occur in an interesting ninth-century list of books
written in a grammatical manuscript at Berlin (Santen. 66).
Hadoardus gives another aspect of the picture. We know nothing
of him but that he calls himself a presbyter and obviously lived in an
establishment-most likely monastic-where he had a good library at
command. He put together a collection of moral, religious and philo-
sophical excerpts which has survived in one manuscript. Its distinguishing
feature is that a large part consists of extracts from the philosophical
writings of Cicero. Hadoardus had no more of these than we have;
the Republic was not known to him. Cicero is useful to him merely as
a moralist, and he expunges from his extracts the personal and historical
allusions, so that what we thank him for is little more than the evidence
he supplies as to the existence in his time of the collected philosophical
works in very much their present shape.
It is long since I have made any reference to Spain. The little
that can now be said must be confined to the Christian writers: I
cannot touch on the great literary and scientific achievements of the
conquering Moors. And the Christian writers were not very remarkable.
A mass of matter connected with the Adoptionist heresy appeared at
the end of the eighth century. The question at issue (recalled by the
Filioque clause): Was the Son of God Son by adoption, as opposed to
eternal generation ? was affirmed by Felix of Urgel and Elipandus of
Toledo and, outside Spain, denied by Alcuin. Within the country Beatus
wrote against Elipandus, but he would hardly have been remembered for
that alone. He is remembered, however, both by patristic students and
by those interested in art, as the compiler of an immense commentary on
the Apocalypse from sources which are some of them lost and valuable.
Copies of this (to which Jerome on Daniel is almost always added), pro-
fusely illustrated, are the chief monuments of Spanish art for the ninth
and following centuries. The designs of the pictures were transmitted with
almost Chinese fidelity from one scriptorium to another : among them
is a map of the world which has a special place of its own in geographical
history.
In the middle of the ninth century a pair of Cordovan writers emerge
to whom a few words must be devoted: Paulus Albarus, a converted Jew,
and Eulogius (Eulogio), Archbishop of Toledo, who died a martyr in
859. The writings of Eulogius are chiefly concerned with the martyrs of
his own time, and with polemic against the Prophet ; those of Paul include
a life of Eulogius and a good deal of indifferent verse. Their main
importance is, no doubt, for Spanish history, and they are mentioned
here principally in virtue of a passage in the life of Eulogius which
bears on general literature. In 848, says Paul, Eulogius brought back
>
CH. XX.


## p. 524 (#570) ############################################

524
John the Scot
from certain monasteries a number of books. Virgil, Horace, Juvenal,
Avienus are specially named, and also the epigrams of Adelelmus, who
is no other than our English Aldhelm. The fact that Aldhelm was read
in Spain in the ninth century is worth noting. We remember how
Aldhelm himself at the end of the seventh century read Julian of Toledo
and Eugenius.
A chapter of history yet unwritten will most likely disclose many
unsuspected threads of connexion between Ireland, Britain, and Spain.
In the making of it the rôle of the liturgiologist will be an important one.
We return to Central Europe. A good deal of space in the last
chapter was devoted to Greek learning and to Irish culture. Now that
we have passed to the middle years of the ninth century, both subjects
come before us again. Their representatives are in the first instance
Johannes Scottus Eriugena and Sedulius Scottus, but these are only the
protagonists. There was a crowd of minor personages, some few of whom
will claim separate notice. The testimony of the time is that imperial
and royal courts and the palaces of the great ecclesiastics were thronged
with needy “Scotti,” all learned in their various ways, all willing to teach,
and all seeking (not always in the most dignified terms) shelter and
maintenance. Heiric of Auxerre, writing about 876, represents the
influx of Irish scholars as due to the enlightened liberality of Charles
the Bald. “Ireland, despising the dangers of the sea, is migrating
almost en masse with her crowd of philosophers to our shores, and all
the most learned doom themselves to voluntary exile to attend the
bidding of Solomon the wise. ” But this was not the sole or even the
chief reason.
As the rhetoricians of Gaul had been driven into Ireland
by one set of invasions, so now the Irish were driven out of it by
another, that of the Scandinavian pirates who had already done so much
mischief in England. We cannot doubt that lamentable destruction of
books took place in Ireland too, but we know little or nothing about
established libraries there.
We first hear of John the Scot at the court of Charles the Bald in
845, and his first continental writing was on predestination against
Gottschalk (851). Not very long after, in 858–860, he made his first
important translation from Greek, of the works called of Dionysius the
Areopagite. The copy he used was most likely one which in 827 the
Greek Emperor, Michael, had given to the Abbey of St Denis'. Hilduin,
Abbot of that house, had done his best to establish the identity of the
patron of the Abbey with the Areopagite, and the identification was
commonly accepted throughout the medieval period.
It is generally agreed that John knew Greek before he left Ireland.
This would make it natural to commit to him the task of rendering the
very difficult language and matter of Dionysius into Latin. But the
1 Now at Paris (B. N. Gr. 437).


## p. 525 (#571) ############################################

Sedulius Scottus
525
a
contents were such as were certain to attract him. He was a philosopher
born, and the blend of Neo-Platonism and Christianity in these writings was
exactly suited to his temperament. He performed his work in a way
that excited the wonder of a very competent scholar at Rome: for in
860 the translation was sent to Pope Nicholas, and he referred it for an
opinion to his librarian Anastasius, who had done much work of the
kind. Anastasius marvels how a man from a remote and barbarous land
could have attained such mastery of Greek ; Irish learning was evidently
an unknown thing to him.
In his dedications of his version to the Emperor, and also in a good
many of his occasional poems, John ventures upon original Greek verse
composition : here he is at his weakest, both as poet and as prosodist;
the scansion is surprisingly bad. The Dionysius was followed by the
Ambigua of Maximus (άπορα εις Γρηγόριον περί φύσεων), also a difficult
text to translate and not one of much importance. Most likely no other
philosophical text (if we except the Solutiones of Priscianus Lydus, as to
which there is doubt) came into John's hands. He made no other trans-
lations, but turned to the composition of his last and greatest work, to
which he gave a Greek title, tepi duoen peplo moù (867). Little copied,
for it soon became suspect of pantheism, it is the most original piece of
speculative thought which these centuries have to shew. Nothing so
remarkable probably was put forth until Anselm came.
Other works by John to which no precise date has been assigned are
his excerpts from Macrobius on the verb, which preserve all we have of
a very valuable book, a fragmentary commentary on St John's Gospel
in which he makes use of the Greek text, and commentaries on Martianus
Capella and Boethius. We still await a critical edition of the whole of
the works of this very marked scholar and thinker. It is unfair to judge
of his personality from silence, but the fact remains that there is no
written tribute to any but his intellectual gifts.
Sedulius Scottus is found at Liège about 848, and after a lapse of ten
years becomes untraceable. In him we have no original thinker, but a
writer of some skill, a most industrious compiler and transcriber, and
a lover of ancient literature. His book De rectoribus Christianis addressed
to Lothar II, interspersed with pieces of verse in many metres (after
the fashion of Boethius) and with copious quotations from the Proverbia
Graecorum (see p. 504), is his best original composition. There are, too,
many fugitive pieces of verse, some addressed to his patrons, one or two
to his Irish companions, others descriptive of works of art, for example,
a silken pall embroidered with a long series of scenes from the life of
St Peter. Under the head of compilations we reckon his collections on
St Matthew and on the Pauline Epistles (the former as yet unprinted)
and his Commentaries on grammatical works, Priscian, Donatus, Eutychius.
In the last-named, which was very likely written in Ireland, he uses that
tract of Macrobius on the verb, of which John has been the chief preserver.
CH. XX.


## p. 526 (#572) ############################################

526
Glossaries
There is also in the library of the hospital of Cues (Cusa) near Trèves
a manuscript of a commonplace book of his of very remarkable character.
It has supplied us with pieces of Cicero's orations against Piso and for
Fonteius which are wanting in our other copies, and of Vegetius, Porphyrio,
and Lactantius. Partly perhaps because of the many Greek passages in
his works, Lactantius was little read or copied between the ninth and
the fifteenth century. To Sedulius however these were no deterrent; he
collects some of them at the end of a Greek psalter which we have of
his transcribing. A remark of Traube's will be in place here: “I hazard
the guess," he says, “that wherever Greek passages survive in Latin
works, they are to be referred to Irish influence. "
The manuscripts transcribed by Sedulius and his circle remain to be
noticed. Those which are most confidently ascribed to his hand are the
Psalter just mentioned, which is signed by him (it is now in the Arsenal
Library at Paris, and was once at St Nicholas's Abbey at Verdun), and
a Graeco-Latin copy of the Pauline Epistles at Dresden, of which the
Codex Augiensis at Trinity College, Cambridge, is a transcript. There
are besides at St Gall a Priscian, perhaps brought from Ireland, and a
Gospels in Greek and Latin (known as A), and there is a famous book
at Berne (363) containing our oldest copy of Horace's Odes. In these we
find, scribbled on margins, Irish names, and names of others, such as
Hartgar of Tongres, Gunther of Cologne, Hilduin, Hincmar, etc. , whom
we know to have been connected with Sedulius. His own name also
occurs not unfrequently.
Of the less distinguished members of the band of Irish scholars,
Dunchad or Duncant has been asserted and also denied to be the author
of a Comment on Martianus Capella (not printed). Common to this,
and to John the Scot's comment on the same author, is a fragment of
the lost Peplus of Theophrastus, which is also copied in a Laon manu-
script (444) written by an Irish teacher, Martin of Laon (1875). This
book contains a Graeco-Latin glossary, and, inter alia, Greek verses
by Martin himself, no better and no worse than those of John.
νυν ληγε νεανισκε λεγειν, δος δεσματα χιλσιν (χείλεσιν)
is the last line, and a fair sample.
Room must be found here for a word about glossaries. They were
the indispensable tool of any who aspired to a knowledge of Greek, and
were used by others who had no real grasp of the language but desired
to be thought Greek scholars. The two chief Graeco-Latin glossaries
go by the names of Cyrillus and Philoxenus respectively. The prime
authority for the text of Cyrillus is an ancient manuscript in the Harleian
collection (5792) which came from the hospital of Cues. We now know
that Laon 444, written by Martin, is a copy of it, and this means that
in the ninth century it was at or near Laon. It was not, however,
written in France, but most likely in Italy: its archetype is conjectured


## p. 527 (#573) ############################################

The Irish circle; mythographers
527
to have been a papyrus book. Philoxenus depends upon a ninth century
manuscript at Paris, and this too is referred to the neighbourhood of
Laon, or at least to the north of France.
Fergus was another of the Irish circle; he was the writer of part of
the St Gall Gospels (A). Yet another, of whom we know little more
than the name, was Elias, a connecting link between the Irish and their
most distinguished continental pupil, Heiric of Auxerre.
Heiric learned what Greek he knew from an Irish teacher or teachers
at Laon; he also sat under Lupus of Ferrières, and at his lectures took
down excerpts from Valerius Maximus and Suetonius. Elias supplied him
with the text of two collections of apophthegms, one current under the
name of Caecilius Balbus. A manuscript now at the abbey of Melk in
Austria preserves (with autograph notes by Heiric) another set of extracts
which is particularly interesting as including some from Petronius. The
copy from which these were taken is now divided between the libraries
of Berne and Paris.
His own works are not epoch-making: commentaries on some of the
poets, which supplied material to his pupil Remigius, and a long life of
St Germanus of Auxerre in verse. In this he makes considerable parade
of his Greek, intercalating into his dedications many words which he got
from the works of Dionysius the Areopagite. He makes such experiments
in lyric metres as shew him to have been a student of the Odes and
Epodes of Horace, and he is credited with being the first of his time to
pay much attention to these poems, which were always far less popular
than the Satires and Epistles.
Those who have studied the commentaries of Heiric award to them
higher praise for real soundness of learning than to those of Remigius.
But the name of the latter lived on, and Heiric's did not. Remigius
learnt of Dunchad as well as of Heiric, and taught at Rheims for Arch-
bishop Fulk, and at Paris. He lived on into the tenth century, and, it
is said, had Odo of Cluny among his pupils. The tale of his writings is a
long one, consisting almost entirely of commentaries upon grammarians,
poets, and books of the Bible. A tract on the Mass and a glossary of
proper names in the Bible, both ascribed to him, went on being copied
down to the end of the Middle Ages. Few of the many Bibles of the
thirteenth century are without the Interpretationes Nominum.
This is perhaps the place to mention the mythographers. Two anony
mous collections of stories of the ancient gods and heroes, very baldly
told, were printed by Mai from Vatican manuscripts of the tenth and
eleventh centuries, along with a later one which does not concern us.
The second of these mythographers copies a good deal of matter from
the first, and has been, not quite certainly, identified with Remigius.
The first quotes authors as late as Orosius, and mingles tales from
Roman history with his mythology. Neither attained a wide circulation,
but they deserve a word in virtue of their attempts to hand on the
a
CH. XX.


## p. 528 (#574) ############################################

528
Anastasius the Librarian
ancient legends and throw light on the allusions to them in classical
literature.
By the end of the ninth century, it is probably true to say that the
Irish stimulus had worked itself out. Had a steady supply of Greek
texts been available, one cannot doubt that men would have been found
to make use of them, but, it must be repeated, no new material was
coming in. Byzantium despised the West and did not care to enlighten
it. The Greek monasteries of Southern Italy seem never to have attracted
any attention in the north. The chief scholar at Rome, Anastasius
Bibliothecarius, died in 897 and left no successor. Something more needs
to be said of what he had accomplished. Nearly all his translations,
which are not few, were made at the request of friends or of the Pope.
He revised John's Dionysius and provided it with scholia rendered from
Greek. He put into Latin the Acts of two Councils, that of 787 and
that in which Photius was deposed and Ignatius restored to the patri-
archate. For John the Deacon, who was designing a large Church history,
he translated the Chronography of Nicephorus and copied extracts
from the chronicles of George the Syncellus and of Theophanes, the
three together forming what was known as the Chronographia tri-
partita, not to be confused with the Historia tripartita that was made
for Cassiodorus. It is an imposing list, and there is more than this to his
credit.
The excursions made into Greek literature in the tenth century are
almost negligible. In the middle of it Leo of Naples produced a version
of an Alexander-romance for Duke John of Naples from a manuscript he
had brought from Constantinople. It marks a stage in the spread of
that most influential romance. Later on we encounter another type of
Greek scholar, the man thoroughly familiar with the spoken language,
in Liudprand of Cremona, diplomat and historian.
It is not pretended that what has been said here of the study and
influence of Greek in these centuries is a complete survey. The gaps will
be obvious to experts. The province of liturgy, for instance, has not
been touched, and there is much in early tropers and other service books
which goes to shew that forms were borrowed from the Byzantines,
That the litanies of the Saints first appeared in Greek, transmitted
from Rome late in the seventh century to England by a Greek-speaking
Pope, is a proposition recently maintained by that great scholar Edmund
Bishop. Hagiography, again, would easily fill a chapter of its own. We
do not yet know all that was done by eastern monks, driven westward
by the Iconoclastic troubles, in the way of translation of Acts of Saints,
or more generally in the diffusion of their language. Further—a small
matter, this, perhaps—it would be worth while to collect the instances
in which western scribes have employed the Greek alphabet for their
titles and colophons; it is mainly a piece of harmless parade, but
is not wholly insignificant. Irishmen, Bretons, and Spaniards were
a


## p. 529 (#575) ############################################

Gottschalk
529
a
a
fondest of the practice, though it is not confined to them. Yet another
class of documents in which the use of rare Greek words became a
fashion are the charters of the tenth century, especially those made in
England.
This love of a bizarre vocabulary, which we have noticed before, crops
up again and again almost to the end of our period. About 830 we have
the strange poem of Lios Monocus, a Breton, who uses the Hisperica
Famina. About 896, Abbo of St Germain appends to his two books
of verse on the siege of Paris by the Northmen a third which is nothing
but a series of conundrums, unintelligible from the first without a gloss,
A hundred years later our English chronicler Fabius Aethelweard puts
the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle into a very crabbed Latin with tags of verse
and sesquipedal compounds of his own devising.
It is a relief to turn from these oddities to some writings which have
an appreciable value as literature. Gottschalk or Godescalcus, monk of
Orbais (805-869), fills an enormous space in the dogmatic history of his
time.