The survival rate of ancient literature

[Endre Fodstad]

In my course on the Carolingian, Twelfth Century, and Early Modern renaissances, I learned that the Italian Humanists were very strong on emphasizing that they were the proper heirs of Roman culture, not those barbarians north of the Alps. So these insistences that the Classics were being neglected in dust were at least partly a way of staking claim on them- "see, only we can truely appreciate the Romans."

Nothing builds solidarity like a claim to exclusiveness! Some earlier scholars, like J.M.Clark back in the thirties, were quite unflattering to the humanist book-hunters, painting them as unscrupulous thieves and book-raiders. In some cases, they did steal manuscripts, of course (justifying their actions by the argumentation you note, doubtlessly).But, as Kaczynski and others have shown, the monastic libraries of for example St. Gall were not drastically emptied of manuscrips even if contemporary accounts describe Poggio's lads making off with wagonfuls of looted work - It is uncertain exactly how the MS74A in Zurich was returned to St.Gall to eventually survive to our day; Poggio might just have borrowed it for copying rather than making off with it.

On the other hand, most monasteries weren't capable of doing much with the Classics, even if they had and respected copies. After the early middle ages, most clergy with intellectual aspirations were in other parts of the church.

That depends, I think: St.Gall (again :wink: ) , had a lively book-copying scriptorium going well beyond its heyday in the 9th - to return to Quntilian, his Institutes were the direct influence on teaching methods at Chartres in the 12th-early 13th century. I don't know if this was from copies or fragments somewhere else or from St.Gall's copy, but anyway - the monastry's real decay only set in in the late 1300s. So they at least disseminated books, in addition to storing them, if the monastries weren't at the forefront of the intellectual activity in the high and late middle ages. When you look through manuscript lists, it is amazing how (relatively) many of them are listed as copies from a monastry, considering the much-publizised change to commercial book copying in the 13th century. Some even postdate the printing press!