Part 5

In the minuscule writing of Greek, which is usually {48}supposed to have come into use about the end of the eighth century, there never was the same calligraphical character as the uncials of an earlier time had exhibited, nor the same desire to attain symmetrical beauty as was shown over and over again in the manuscripts of Western Europe. The best writing of Greek minuscules belongs to the ninth and tenth centuries of our era, in which a sufficient amount of practice had been gained to ensure regularity of form. A specimen of such writing, executed towards the end of the tenth century, probably in Cyprus, will be found in Plate 6. From the eleventh century to the sixteenth all minuscule writing in Greek looks like a free cursive written without any calligraphical ambition, and it became more and more ungraceful as time went on. The value of Greek MSS., however, depends more upon their contents than upon their beauty, and frequently the roughest-looking piece of work may command an interest far greater than attaches to the splendid penmanship of the west.

The recently discovered "Gospel of Peter" is in a curious primitive minuscule hand, which the editor of the facsimile, Oscar von Gebhardt, ascribes hesitatingly to the eighth or ninth century, as had already been done by H. Omont. It would not be surprising if other scholars were to assign it to the seventh century, and thereby throw back the age of Greek minuscule writing to a century or more behind the date usually fixed for it. The mingling in that curious Christian document of many uncial forms, with a set of minuscular letters that betray a want of familiarity with set minuscules, seems to prove that the book is older than the eighth century. This observation is made, not from any desire to be critical, but simply in order to show that the question of age, mentioned in the preceding paragraph, is a thing which is still not finally settled.

{49}_The Tenth Century_

The Irish school of writing, after its triumphs of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries, lost much of its home-life in the midst of the struggles with the Norsemen. In England and on the continent its influence was still felt for some time longer; even in the thirteenth century many of the Psalters produced by English illuminators have the initial letter B decorated in the style adopted from the Irish six centuries before. Irish MSS. of any age are excessively rare; even the comparatively worthless transcripts of the eighteenth century are in no inconsiderable request.

The English school continued to blend its Irish style of writing with the illustrative pictures and borders which may have been entirely of native production in the eighth century, as was seemingly the fact, or may have originated from the artistic tendencies of Frankish Gaul, as has already been surmised. They were, in any case, influenced to some degree by examples of late Roman work, introduced by the Italian missionaries who came to convert the Saxons of South England after the Angles of the north had been converted by the Irish monks of Iona. It was really this English phase of decorative art which blossomed into Anglo-Norman in the twelfth century.

The French schools were still Carolingian and splendid, but their pre-eminence was not maintained after the breaking up of the empire of Charles the Great. The revolutions of the ninth century led to the making of nations. France ceased to be the Gallo-Roman province of a Frankish monarchy. A French language and a French nation emerged into existence in the tenth century, but the grand ornamental and calligraphic work of the Franco-Gallic time was no longer equalled. The Caroline writing, which attained its greatest beauty about the middle of the {50}ninth century, gradually lost its elegant boldness, tending towards angularity and crampness when the eleventh century had begun.

_Scandinavian Writing_

The Scandinavian countries have not yet been alluded to specifically. The immense quantity of Runic monuments found in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, of all ages, and in England, of and after the Norse period, proves that Runic writing was almost exclusively Scandinavian. There is now no question as to the actual origin of the Runic alphabets. They came into existence, as already said, by reason of the necessities of the amber-traffic between the coast of the Baltic and the Crimea long before the time of Christ; but what has survived belongs to the monuments of the North. The real age of the extant runes does not probably exceed the fifth century. That they were prized as national characteristics seems to be proved by their continued use among the Northmen, even after they had come into collision with a superior civilisation in the British isles.

Christianity was not so easily adopted in Scandinavia as in some other countries. From the time of the first mission to its ultimate triumph at least two centuries elapsed, and the result might have been still further delayed if it had not been for the example of two royal proselytes, Olaf Trygvason and St. Olaf, who belong to the first half of the eleventh century. With the first introduction of Christianity, the Norse people also received the script which they had found in use in England. The colonisers of Iceland, in the ninth and tenth centuries, carried with them the language and the writing of Scandinavia; and it was probably the remoteness of that island from Norway which has caused the preservation in it, down to the present {51}day, of the old Norse tongue (little modified by age) and the Anglo-Saxon letters of the tenth century.

In Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, the influence of North Germany prevailed in time over old national tradition, and the gothic hand of the thirteenth century took the place of the special alphabet. By the time of the Reformation the writing in Scandinavia had been wholly Teutonised (with some exceptions too slight to need mention). The most remarkable part of the change was the exclusion of the _th_ letter from the script of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. This tendency, which had for centuries been in growth, had the remarkable effect of practically confining the old Norse literature to Iceland, and of making it the apparent home of all the poems and Sagas which Norway had produced. It was at least the home of most of the literary men who in the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries wrote for the delight of their kinsmen, in both Norway and Iceland. The great literary activity in Iceland, at that time and afterwards, produced a large quantity of MSS., usually written on vellum, and rudely decorated with painted initials; but of those which remained in the country most have perished. A relatively considerable number were, however, carried to Denmark in the sixteenth and later centuries, and have been preserved in museums. Very few yet remain in circulation, unsecured by public appropriation.

_The Slavonic Alphabet_

Slavonic writing is said to have begun with St. Jerome. To him is ascribed the invention of the Glagolitic alphabet, a set of symbols for Illyrian use, which seem to have no affinity to any of the familiar scripts. It cannot have obtained much currency, notwithstanding the ample sufficiency of its twenty-eight letters; as otherwise the Cyrillic alphabet (derived from the Greek, with necessary {52}additions) would never have come into being. In any case, St. Cyril's alphabet, devised in the ninth century for the use of the Slovenes in Moravia, quite overpowered the Glagolitic of Dalmatia, and while the Croats and the Dalmatians, who came under the influence of the Roman see, retained their Glagolitic only for liturgical use, the Slavs to the east fell into communion with the Greek Church, and employed the Cyrillic letters as their national type of writing. It has lasted to the present time in its old form, in biblical and liturgical books of which the texts are ancient, but a plainer type, more like the Greek of to-day, has been adopted for modern literature. The Poles and Bohemians, and the various Slavs in Germany, have always followed the custom of Germany in writing. The Russian alphabet is more complex than that of Servia; but it is only in modern time that the latter has been simplified. The Bulgarians, since the establishment of their autonomy, have given up the old Slovene alphabet, and adopted that of Servia.

_The Labour of Mediæval Scribes from the Ninth Century onwards_

The literature which was to afford material for the exercise of the penmen's skill was restricted within Christian boundaries. It was rarely that a scribe condescended to make copies of any of the literary work produced in pagan Rome or Greece. Occasional instances are found which offer exception to the rule, but as in the ninth century all the men who knew how to write were, in one form or another, servants of the Church, it was not to be expected that many among them would help to perpetuate the pernicious books of the dead heathens. Consequently many of the treasures of ancient literature perished. The Bible was the substitute; and innumerable copies were made in the East and the West of the book which has influenced the world more powerfully {53}than any other production of the wit of man. In the East, there was a more logical tendency to neglect the Old Testament and to copy only the New; in the West, it was the custom to multiply transcripts of the complete Latin Scripture as left by St. Jerome. Besides the Bible, there were the liturgical monuments. The Sacramentary which contained the order of sacrifice and adoration in the most solemn office of the Church, with all the prayers that preceded and followed the acts of offering and worship, required careful and frequent copying, so that it should not deviate in the smallest degree from the established model. The slight changes which constituted differences of use in this part of the liturgy, and which have distinguished the so-called Gallican, Mozarabic, Milanese, and Celtic churches as at least co-æval with (and possibly older than) the Latin church of Rome, began to lose their historic distinctness in the ninth century and soon faded away. The survival of belated and rare examples (by the grace of papal sanction) at Toledo and at Milan, is but an antiquarian curiosity without any significance. Rome triumphed in the ninth century, and the diversities in certain respects which have been dignified in England and elsewhere with the name of "use" since then, are simply local varieties in unimportant particulars.

Beyond the establishment of the supreme rite of sacrifice on certain holy days, the Church began, at an early period of its existence, to treat every day as consisting of so many hours of which some were necessarily to be yielded up to religious service. The use of the Psalms, and of set prayers, for that purpose, and the fact that the anniversaries of saints' and martyrs' deaths had to be borne in remembrance, led to the creation of the Breviary. Besides this, the office of the Mass itself became requisite for celebration on every day as well as on the more solemn days, and thus a variable portion (according to the character of the day) had to be added to the invariable. Thus enlarged, the volume of the {54}Sacramentary, with all its lessons from the Bible, and its accumulations of antiphonal phrases, grew into the Missal as we know it. The Breviary underwent similar increase, and the result was to make the Liturgy so extensive and so complex that it gave continual employment in the scriptorium of every church and monastery all over Europe. There were Psalters, Sacramentaries, Missals, Breviaries, Lectionaries of several kinds, Hymnals, Graduals (Books of the chanted antiphonal portions of the Mass), Antiphonaries (Books of the chanted antiphonal portions of the Hours-offices), Martyrologies, Homilies, and (at a later time) Rituals, Processionals, and Pontificals (offices to be performed by Bishops). St. Gregory had been the latest official arranger of the Sacramentary or Missal, in the seventh century; but its text was hardly settled till the twelfth century, and the same may be said of the Breviary. In the ninth century, however, the texts had grown to something not very different from their ultimate state. Here was plenty of work for the priestly and monkish scribes.

Besides the Bible and the Liturgy, there were the works of the fathers, and by-and-by the treatises of the schoolmen and the chronicles of monkish historians; quite enough, in all conscience, to render useless the heavy lucubrations of Livy and Trogus Pompeius, and the absurd conceits of the heathen poets.

Things were not dissimilar in Byzantium. The Liturgy there was even more complex and extensive than in the West, and the foolish literature of old Hellas was generally ignored by the men who were engaged in daily study of the Euchologium, the Horologium, the Menologium, the Archieraticon, the Synaxarium, the Octoechos, &c. The Bibliotheca of Photius shows, however, that the race of students who cultivated the old literature was not wholly extinct.

At all times, both in the East and the West, the letters and charters of Kings, and diplomatic documents of every {55}kind, needed the service of trained penmen. This department of graphic labour was not completely in the hands of churchmen; and it led to the creation of a caste of writers in every country who were not under the influence of the monkish schools. They could not afford to spend so much time as the book writers over their work, and thus a hand of cursive character was established in every chancellery in Europe, devoted only to the service of the State and never employed for any other purpose. It was nearly always ugly, sometimes fantastic, sometimes difficult to be read except by the officials engaged in such work. From the earliest days of diplomatic writing, in the sixth century in Italy, down to the seventeenth century in England, it preserved a strange and fanciful style, first long, thin and narrow letters looking like a congeries of wandering parallel lines indistinguishable without a glass, and finally letters of proper size, but so disguised in shape as to be indecipherable without a special training. At only one period, that is, in the late eleventh and in the twelfth century, was diplomatic writing fair and readable. That was in England and Northern France; but even here, the upright strokes of letters like l, and d, and b, were elongated to an enormous extent, and in their sweep offered to the scribe his few opportunities of ornamentation. As our business, however, is with books we leave the charters and the rescripts on one side, and proceed to the consideration of the main character of the calligrapher's work.

The Bible and the Liturgy for churchmen have been spoken of as the chief objects of reproduction among the scribes for many centuries. It was not till the twelfth century that their labours required to be augmented for the service of laymen. Men (and women) who could afford the expense, or whose position demanded that they should have prayerbooks for their own use, whether they could read ill or well or not at all, were furnished with Latin Psalters, to which were added, at the end, the Athanasian {56}Creed, a Litany of Saints, some general prayers, and the office for the Dead. They were extracts from the Breviary for the use of persons who only prayed occasionally. The growth of something like education, and a religious desire to share to a somewhat greater extent the communion with Heaven which was monopolised by monks and priests, caused a further extension of calligraphic labour towards the beginning of the fourteenth century. The Psalter with its scanty additions was no longer sufficient for pious laymen. A larger selection of prayers and lessons from the Breviary was concocted; the offices of the Virgin, of the Cross, of the Holy Ghost, and of some special saints were united to form the Book of Hours. It was nothing like the severe and frequent task of orisons with which the monks performed their duties at the canonical Hours of the day and night, but it was sufficient for the most zealous laymen and laywomen; and it became the private Prayerbook of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and early sixteenth centuries. During that period it was produced in countless thousands of manuscripts in England, France, Flanders, Italy, and to a less extent in Germany and Spain. In England it was called Horæ Beatæ Mariæ Virginis, or Book of Hours, or Primer; in France always Horæ, or Livre d'Heures; in Italy it was Officium B.V.M., and in Flanders and Holland Ghetijden. The Gebetbuch of Germany belongs chiefly to the fifteenth century, and was nearly always in German, while in France, Flanders, and England, prayers in the vernacular only crept in gradually here and there. (In Italy the book always continued to be written in Latin only.) In the English Hours or Primer the vernacular portions became at last so important that it was found advisable to issue many of the printed Primers in the sixteenth century in bilingual form, Latin and English; and it was undoubtedly this tendency both in England and in Germany which produced the Reformation. It was not so much the desire for a Reformation of the Church--even Boccaccio, himself a churchman, {57}and many others of his kind had wished for _that_--as an invincible demand for a vernacular liturgy, which widened through opposition into an eagerness to sweep away everything that opposed it. Hence the break with Rome, which still imperiously demanded the uniformity that could only be maintained by the use of a single language throughout Europe. The few exceptions to the rule which ecclesiastical policy had ever allowed were in the concession to the affiliated Greek, Slavonic, and Oriental congregations of a right to use their own vernacular liturgies. The antiquity of the Greek and Syriac formulas, on the one hand, the utter impossibility of making Latin familiar even to the priests of the Slavic and Oriental churches, and the certainty that a denial of their needs would throw them into the Byzantine fold--account for Papal acquiescence in that respect. But the Popes could not see that England and Germany, which had from so early a time been the seats of Roman colonies and the homes of Latin churches, likewise needed a liturgy that the people could understand; and that the Teutonic speech of the north had no such generic sympathy with the language of the Roman liturgy as the rustic Latin tongues of Italy, Spain, and France.

The Canon Law, deriving from the remains of the apostolical constitutions and the acts of the Councils, the Penitentiaries which had been formulated by bishops for the government of Christianised barbarians, and the decrees of Popes, began to take shape as a Code in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The existence of forged documents among the decretals was a matter of no great importance. Everything was sufficiently old to be respectable; and the schools of law, which had never given up the study and cultivation of the Civil Code (digested in Justinian's time from the various works of the old Roman jurists), set to work to arrange and gloss the Canon Law. The two Codes, especially the Ecclesiastical, provided the scribes of Western Europe with an enormous amount of work. Bologna, {58}Padua, Paris, and Oxford were renowned for their lawyers and their schools of law; with the accompanying armies of students and copyists.

Christian poets, too, were not lacking. From the time of Lactantius onwards, the quantity of metrical Latin work done by churchmen was very large; and the lyrical yearning inherent in all societies had produced an immense hymnology, which comprised a great deal of real poetry--most poetical and most charming when least Ciceronian. Here, again, was rich material for the copyists of the scriptorium; and both Hymnals and Lawbooks lent their aid towards the gradual tendency of students to go back and investigate the ancient sources of literature and philosophy and history. Pliny had never been wholly forgotten, even in the most anti-pagan times, and the treatises on natural science which had appeared among the schoolmen, all stimulated curiosity to learn what had been written before the days of Constantine. The result of these intellectual tendencies made the fourteenth century a dawn of the Renaissance, and with the beginning of the fifteenth a large body of heathen literature was annexed to the libraries of universities, scholars, and monasteries, giving increased employment to the transcribers who were at that time busy all over Europe. It was in the thirteenth century that the monks and the priests lost their monopoly of the practice of ornamental writing; in the fourteenth century every great city had its ateliers of calligraphers unconnected with the Church; and when the fifteenth century arrived the trained citizen penmen, who formed crafts throughout Europe, were probably not inferior in number to the scribes who worked in ecclesiastical edifices.

_The Illuminated MSS. of the Middle Ages_

This division of our matter is the largest, and is also the most interesting to the majority of students and {59}collectors. In beginning it, some repetition will be necessary in order to bring the subject as a whole before the reader.