The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts. James Montague Rhodes
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century. The Greek Psalter, then, was pretty certainly at Oxford in Farley's time. What do we know of Greek MSS. then at Oxford? We know that Bishop Robert Grosseteste of Lincoln owned such things, and that he bequeathed his books to the Franciscans of Oxford at his death in 1254; and when we examine the Psalter again, we find that it is full of notes in a hand which occurs in other Greek MSS. known to have belonged to Grosseteste, and which I take to be Grosseteste's autograph. So the mere occurrence of John Farley's name helps us to write the history of the book from within a hundred years of its making until the present day. Procured by Grosseteste some time before 1254, it passes to Oxford, and remains there till the Grey Friar's Convent is dissolved by Henry VIII. Then there is a gap of a generation at most. Matthew Parker, Archbishop of Canterbury, acquires it (believing it, absurdly enough, to have belonged to Archbishop Theodore in the seventh century), and bequeaths it to his college of Corpus Christi in 1574.
We turn to the Latin division, and here the difficulty of selecting lines of procedure is very great. A paragraph of historical preface, at any rate, must be attempted.
At the period of the Barbarian invasions—the fifth century—the learned countries were Italy, France (especially Southern France) and Spain. Of these three, Italy may be described as stationary or even decadent, but she possessed greater accumulations of books than either of the other two. The result of the invasions was, no doubt, that libraries were destroyed and education dislocated; but there was another result, as we have lately begun to realize—namely, that in the case of France there was a transplanting of culture to another soil. A number of teachers fled the country, and some at least came to Ireland. This, as far as we can now see, was the beginning of that Irish learning which has been so widely, yet so vaguely, extolled. Ireland, then, in the late fifth century and the sixth, holds the lamp. Its light passes to England in the middle of the seventh century, and from thence, near the end of the eighth, to the Court of Charlemagne, where it initiates the Carolingian Renaissance. In the ninth century, when England is a prey to the Danes, the Carolingian Court and the great abbeys of Germany are enjoying a vigorous intellectual life, stimulated and enriched by scholars from Italy and from Ireland. In a general view the tenth and eleventh centuries must figure as a period of degeneration; the twelfth as one of immense intellectual and artistic vigour, culminating in the thirteenth. In the fourteenth the foundations of what we call the Renaissance are already being laid, and we have hardly passed the middle of the fifteenth before the MS. has received its death-blow in the publication of the first printed Bible.
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