The History Of Education by Ellwood P. Cubberley (epub e reader .txt) 📖

more to produce a few copies, depending on the size and nature of the work, whereas to-day, with printing-presses, five thousand copies of such a book as this can be printed and bound in a few days.

 

[Illustration: FIG. 40. A MONK IN A SCRIPTORIUM

(From an illuminated picture in a manuscript in the Royal Library at Brussels) This picture shows the beautiful work done in “illuminating”

manuscript books by mediaeval writers. Each copy was a work of art. This represents a better type of scriptorium than is usually shown.]

 

THE SCRIPTORIUM. An important part of the material equipment of many monasteries, in consequence, came to be a scriptorium, or writing-room, where the copying of manuscripts could take place undisturbed. In some monasteries one general room was provided, though it was customary to have a number of small rooms at the side of the library. In the monastery shown in Figure 38, seven small rooms for this purpose are shown built out on one side of the library. Sometimes individual cells along a corridor were provided. The advantage of the single room in which a number of monks worked came when an edition of eight or ten copies of a book was to be prepared. One monk could then dictate, while eight or ten others carefully printed on the skins before them what was dictated by the reader. [13]

Figure 40 shows a monk at work, though here he is copying from a book before him. After an edition of eight or ten copies of a book had been prepared and bound the extra copies were sent to neighboring and sometimes distant monasteries, sometimes in exchange for other books, and sometimes as gifts to brothers who had longed to read the work (R. 55). New monasteries were provided with the beginnings of a library in this way, and churches were supplied with Missals, Psalters, and other books needed for their services.

 

The writing-room, or rooms, came to be a very important place in those monasteries noted for their literary activity. West gives an interesting description of the scriptorium at Tours, where the learned English monk, Alcuin, was Abbot from 796 to 804, and which at the time was the principal book-writing monastery in Frankland. Describing Alcuin’s labors to secure books to send to other monasteries in Charlemagne’s kingdom, he says: We can almost reconstruct the scene. In the intervals between the hours of prayer and the observance of the round of cloister life, come hours for the copying of books under the presiding genius of Alcuin. The young monks file into the scriptorium, and one of them is given the precious parchment volume containing a work of Bede or Isidore or Augustine, or else some portion of the Latin Scriptures, or even a heathen author. He reads slowly and clearly at a measured rate while all the others seated at their desks take down his words, and thus perhaps a score of copies are made at once. Alcuin’s observant eye watches each in turn, and his correcting hand points out the mistakes in orthography and punctuation.

The master of Charles the Great, in that true humility that is the charm of his whole behavior, makes himself the writing-master of his monks, stooping to the drudgery of faithfully and gently correcting their many puerile mistakes, and all for the love of studies and the love of Christ.

Under such guidance, and deeply impressed by the fact that in the copying of a few books they were saving learning and knowledge from perishing, and thereby offering a service most acceptable to God, the copying in the scriptorium went on in sobriety from day to day. Thus were produced those improved copies of books which mark the beginning of a new age in the conserving and transmission of learning. Alcuin’s anxiety in this regard was not undue, for the few monasteries where books could be accurately transcribed were as necessary for publication in that time as are the great publishing houses to-day. [14]

 

[Illustration: FIG. 41. CHARLEMAGNE’S EMPIRE, AND THE IMPORTANT

MONASTERIES OF THE TIME

Charlemagne’s empire at his death is shaded darker than other parts of the map.]

 

MONASTIC COLLECTION. Despite the important work done by a few of the monasteries in preserving and advancing learning, large collections of books were unknown before the Revival of Learning, in the fourteenth century. The process of book production in itself was very slow, and many of the volumes produced were later lost through fire, or pillage by new invaders. During the early days of wood construction a number of monastic and church libraries were burned by accident. In the pillaging of the Danes and Northmen on the coasts of England and northern France, in the ninth and tenth centuries, a number of important monastic collections there were lost. In Italy the Lombards destroyed some collections in their sixth-century invasion, and the Saracens burned some in southern Italy in the ninth. Monte Cassino, among other monasteries, was destroyed by both the Lombards and the Saracens. From a number of extant catalogues of old monastic libraries we know that, even as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a library of from two to three hundred volumes was large. [15] The catalogues show that most of these were books of a religious nature, being monastic chronicles, manuals of devotion, comments on the Scriptures, lives of miracle-working saints, and books of a similar nature (Rs. 55, 56). A few were commentaries on the ancient learning, or mediaeval textbooks on the great subjects of study of the time (R. 60). A still smaller number were copies of old classical literary works, and of the utmost value (R. 57).

 

THE CONVENTS AND THEIR SCHOOLS. The early part of the Middle Ages also witnessed a remarkable development of convents for women, these receiving a special development in Germanic lands. Filled with the same aggressive spirit as the men, but softened somewhat by Christianity, many women of high station among the German tribes founded convents and developed institutions of much renown. This provided a rather superior class of women as organizers and directors, and a conventual life continued, throughout the entire Middle Ages, to attract an excellent class of women.

This will be understood when it is remembered that a conventual life offered to women of intellectual ability and scholarly tastes the one opportunity for an education and a life of learning. The convents, too, were much earlier and much more extensively opened for instruction to those not intending to take the vows than was the case with the monasteries, and, in consequence, it became a common practice throughout the Middle Ages, just as it is to-day among Catholic families, to send girls to the convent for education and for training in manners and religion. Many well-trained women were produced in the convents of Europe in the period from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries.

 

The instruction consisted of reading, writing, and copying Latin, as in the monasteries, as well as music, weaving and spinning, and needlework.

Weaving and spinning had an obvious utilitarian purpose, and needlework, in addition to necessary sewing, was especially useful in the production of altar-cloths and sacred vestments. The copying and illuminating of manuscripts, music, and embroidering made a special appeal to women (R.

56), and some of the most beautifully copied and illuminated manuscripts of the mediaeval period are products of their skill. [16] Their contribution to music and art, as it influenced the life of the time, was also large. The convent schools reached their highest development about the middle of the thirteenth century, after which they began to decline in importance,

 

LEARNING IN IRELAND AND BRITAIN. As was stated earlier in this chapter, the one part of western Europe where something of the old learning was retained during this period was in Ireland, and in those parts of England which had not been overrun by the Germanic tribes. Christian civilization and monastic life had been introduced into Ireland probably as early as 425 A.D., and probably by monastic missionaries from Lerins and Saint Victor (see Figure 41). Saint Patrick preached Christianity to the Irish, about 440 A.D., and during the fifth and sixth centuries churches and monasteries were founded in such numbers over Ireland that the land has been said to have been dotted all over with churches, monasteries, and schools. Saint Patrick had been educated in the old Roman schools, probably at Tours when it was still an important Roman provincial city.

Other early missionaries had had similar training, and these, not sharing the antipathy to pagan learning of the early Italian church fathers, had carried Greek and Latin languages and learning to Ireland. Here it flourished so well, largely due to the island being spared from invasion, that Ireland remained a center for instruction in Greek long after it had virtually disappeared elsewhere in western Christendom. So much was this the case, says Sandys, in his History of Classical Scholarship, “that if any one knew Greek it was assumed that he must have come from Ireland.”

 

In 565 A.D., Saint Columba, an eminent Irish scholar and religious leader, crossed over to what is now southwestern Scotland, founded there the monastery of Iona, and began the conversion of the Picts. Saint Augustine landed in Kent in 597, and had begun the conversion of the Angles and Saxons and Jutes who had settled in southeastern Britain, while shortly afterwards the Irish monks from Iona began the conversion of the people of the north of Britain. The monastery of Lindisfarne was founded about 635

A.D., and soon became an important center of religious and classical learning in the north. Irish and English monks also crossed in numbers to northern Frankland, and labored for the conversion of the Franks and Saxons.

 

In 664 A.D., at a council held at Whitby, the Irish Church in England and the Roman Church were united, and a great enthusiasm for religion and learning swept over the island. In 670, Theodore of Tarsus and the Abbot Hadrian, whom Bede, the scholar and historian of the early English Church, describes as men “instructed in secular and divine literature both Greek and Latin” (R. 59 a), arrived in England from southern Italy and began their work of instructing pupils in Greek and Latin (R. 59 b). Both taught at Canterbury, and raised the cathedral school there to high rank. In 674

the monastery at Wearmouth was founded, and in 682 its companion Yarrow.

These were endowed with books from Rome and Vienne, and soon became famous for the instruction they provided. It was at the twin monasteries of Wearmouth and Yarrow that the Venerable Bede (673-735), whose Ecclesiastical History of England gives us our chief picture of education in Britain in his time, was educated and remained as a lifelong student. [17] As a result of all these efforts a number of northern monasteries, as well as a few of the cathedral schools, early became famous for their libraries, scholars, and learning. This culture in Ireland and Britain was of a much higher standard than that obtaining on the Continent at the time, because the classical inheritance there had been less corrupted.

 

THE CATHEDRAL SCHOOL AT YORK. One of the schools which early attained fame was the cathedral school at York, in northern England. This had, by the middle of the eighth century, come to possess for the time a large library, and contained most of the important Latin authors and textbooks then known (R. 61). In this school, under the scholasticus Aelbert, was trained a youth by the name of Alcuin, born in or near York, about 735

A.D. In a poem describing the school (R. 60), he gives a good portrayal of the instruction he received, telling how the learned Aelbert “moistened thirsty hearts with diverse streams of teaching and the