More is yet to be said of the Franciscans in England, and of their services to sacred literature. They did not confine their attention to the Bible. There is another great literary enterprise, the credit of whose initiation belongs to them, though its subsequent development must be assigned to a Benedictine. Described shortly, it was an attempt to discover and locate all the works of the principal known authors, both sacred and secular, which existed in England. At some time in the fourteenth century circulars were issued, or visits paid, to about one hundred and sixty monasteries. A list of some ninety authors was drawn up, and the writings of each enumerated. The list of libraries and that of books were then fused together in such a way that from the completed work it is possible to ascertain what books by each writer were to be found in England, and in what libraries each book existed. The name given to this compilation is the Catalogus or Registrum Librorum Angliae, and the indications that in this first form it, is the work of a member or members of the Franciscan Order are hardly to be mistaken. Early in the fifteenth century, the work received a most important expansion at the hands of a monk of Bury, John Boston by name. He added a score of names to the list of libraries, and raised to nearly seven hundred the number of authors whose works were enumerated. He gave, moreover, a short biographical sketch of each writer drawn from the best sources at his disposal: so that the book in its completed form might claim to be called a Dictionary of Literature. If this Catalogue of Boston’s did not serve as a model to Trithemius and his successors (and there is no reason to suppose that it did), it was at least the legitimate ancestor of the later Bibliothecae. What is more to the point at present, it furnishes a key to the literary possessions and perhaps still more to the literary needs of England about the year 1400, the importance of which it would be difficult to exaggerate.
It may be necessary to return to the consideration of England’s share in the movement; but we must now proceed to extend the range of our outlook. We have to ask whether, in the home of the Classical Revival, any consciousness existed of the needs of the Church corresponding to the feeling that we have seen stirring in the minds of Grosseteste and of Bacon. As far as we can judge, this question must be answered in the negative. Exceptional opportunities for the furthering of Christian scholarship lay ready to the hands of the Italians in the fourteenth century; yet there is strikingly little to show that advantage was taken of them. It has already been hinted that in Italy the knowledge of Greek as a spoken language was far from uncommon. Large portions of the South were, as Bacon says, “purely Greek”; on the Adriatic coast Greek was widely known. The Court of Rome had its relations with the Eastern patriarchates. The points at issue between the Greek and Latin Churches were productive of a long series of controversial writings on both sides; There was, in fact, no good reason why the knowledge of the Greek Bible and of the great Greek Fathers should not have continued to exist at the papal Court, and have been diffused from thence over the West. Yet we do not find that such knowledge existed in any appreciable degree. The thought of applying the knowledge of Greek to the study of the Bible seems hardly to have occurred to the Italian scholars of the fourteenth century. There are, it is true, examples dating from this period of Gospel-books and other parts of the Bible written in Greek and Latin, and emanating from Venice and Florence. It is commonly said, too, that an English Bishop -Adam Easton, Bishop of Norwich and Cardinal of St Cecilia-made a fresh version of the whole Bible from the original while in Italy. But this last assertion stands in need of corroboration; and at best it would indicate, not an activity of Italians in sacred studies, but the existence in Italy of materials by the aid “of which such studies could be prosecuted. The difficulty of discovering any symptom of consciousness that the field of theological study needed widening is of more weight than are the isolated examples of a wider learning which have been cited.
Before the fifteenth century has fairly opened we find nothing that can be called a decided current setting in the direction of wider learning or true sacred scholarship. It was not immediately that the rush of new discoveries involved those whose prime interest lay in things sacred. But when we hear of a Queen of Cyprus presenting a copy of the Gospels in Greek to a Pope, of a Greek prelate on his way to the Council of Florence giving another copy to a church at Verona, of a Cardinal (Cusanus) in the same year buying a third at Constantinople, and, within four years more, of copies being written in Italy itself, we feel sure that the movement is well in train.
Once begun, its development can be followed up along many lines. Three in particular suggest themselves as fruitful in indications not likely to be fallacious. First, we may take stock of what was done in the way of collecting ancient texts and forming libraries in which to preserve them. Secondly, we may review the work of the translators and copyists who made the new material accessible to their public; and, in the third place, we may trace the beginnings of criticism as applied to the documents which were already known, and to those which began now to be known for the first time.
Much has been written upon the first of these topics, but chiefly from the point of view of men interested in the Classical Revival. There is not a great deal that can suitably be added in this place to the story of the rediscovery of ancient literature. The work done by the collectors of Greek books was a wholly new work; we shall see the results of it most clearly in the course of our examination of the libraries. With the early literature of the Latin Church the case was different. There were but few Christian writers among those whom Poggio and his fellows rescued from an age-long obscurity; and the welcome accorded to these by the humanists was theirs as Latinists rather than as theologians. Tertullian and Lactantius are the leading names of this class. The first copy of the works of the former was found at Basel by Tommaso Parentucelli (afterwards Nicholas V). Lactantius, never a frequent author in medieval libraries, had hardly found a single copyist between the eleventh and the fourteenth century. A library at Bologna had preserved the earliest and best manuscript of his Institutions, and other tracts were yielded up by St Gall and the German abbeys. The most important Latin books apart from these were some of the early versions of Greek patristic works, such as that of Origen’s Homilies on Luke, the finding of which, at St Cecilia’s in Home, gladdened the heart of Ambrogio Traversari. However, it must be allowed that, upon the whole, the Latin finds of the earlier period were inconsiderable. The work of Irenaeus, though known to exist, attracted very little attention- chiefly, we may conjecture, because of its barbarous style; the Latin version of Hermas was hardly read; and the writings of Arnobius and Minucius Felix, which are of the kind that would have proved most pleasing to the humanists, were reserved for the explorers of the next century.
The libraries which received and preserved the stock of new material claim to be discussed at greater length. The natural centre for the formation of a great Christian library was the papal Court. Private amateurs like Niccolo Niccoli might, and actually did, accomplish much in the way of rescuing and bringing together books of all kinds; but it is a clear and familiar fact that what they prized most were the masterpieces of the pagan literature. It is the clergy, and above all the Pope, whom we expect to find caring for the archives of Christian antiquity. Fortunately, we are in a position to estimate very accurately, by the help of library catalogues, the measure of what was done in this line. The greatest of the early papal bibliophiles was Nicholas V (1447-55). It is not necessary to spend words here upon describing his activity as a collector or his munificence as a patron of letters. We shall run less risk of exaggeration if we draw from so unemotional a document as the inventory of his books, made at his decease. A short survey of the collection, if dry, will at least afford some basis of solid fact. In 1455, then, the library of Nicholas V consisted of 824 Latin and 352 Greek manuscripts. We must not expect to find in the Latin library any sign that the learning of the schools is losing its interest. The theology and the Canon Law of the later centuries are as fully represented here as in any Abbey library of them all. What we have to note as significant is the presence-partly in old copies newly brought to light, partly in new versions or in manuscripts written to order-of a number of writings whose existence or whose importance was but just