It is a temptation, when one turns to England, to enlarge upon the early
history of Greek scholarship in the country, but it is a temptation
which must be resisted. We had a share in preparing for the revival of
learning. Roger Bacon and Grosseteste (I say nothing of the earlier age,
of Theodore of Tarsus and Bede) were men whose work in this direction
has hardly met with full appreciation as yet; and later on we gave
Erasmus a welcome and a home. But we did not rival Italy or France in
the early scramble for Greek books. Such classical MSS. of first-class
value as we possess have been importations of the seventeenth and later
centuries. Let me, however, speak somewhat more in detail.
There was a turbulent person called George Neville, who died Archbishop
of York in 1476. It is evident, though not, I think, from anything that
he wrote, that he was interested in Greek learning, and not only
theological learning. A MS. of some orations of Demosthenes now at
Leyden contains a statement by the scribe that he wrote it for
Archbishop Neville in 1472. This is our starting-point. Now, the scribe
in question--Emmanuel of Constantinople--generally writes a hand (ugly
enough) which no one who has once seen it can fail to recognize. This
hand appears in a not inconsiderable group of books: in a Plato and an
Aristotle now at Durham, in a Suidas given by the Chapter of Durham to
Lord Oxford (Brit. Mus., MS., Harl. 3,100), in a rather famous New
Testament at Leicester, in three Psalters at Oxford and Cambridge, and
in half of another copy of Suidas at Oxford. In this second Suidas
Emmanuel's hand is associated with another, equally easy to
recognize--that of Joannes Serbopoulos. Serbopoulos lived, I know not
how long, in the abbey at Reading, and transcribed several Greek MSS.
now in Oxford and Cambridge libraries; he was still at work in the first
years of the sixteenth century. This little episode is one that
demonstrates, in a rather pleasing way, the value of the study of
handwritings and of the inscriptions written by scribes; the light it
throws on the history of scholarship is unexpected, and is worth having.
Two Biblical MSS. of high importance came to England as gifts to our
Sovereigns. One was the well-known Codex Alexandrinus (A), given to
Charles I. in 1628 by Cyril Lucar, the reforming Patriarch of
Constantinople. Of the other I shall take leave to say more. It was that
known as the Cottonian Genesis, which was brought over by two Greek
Bishops "from Philippi" and presented to Henry VIII. It was a
sixth-century copy of the Book of Genesis, written in uncial letters and
illustrated, we are told, with 250 pictures. Queen Elizabeth passed it
on to her tutor, Sir John Fortescue, and he to Sir Robert Cotton, the
collector of a library of which we shall hear more in the sequel, and in
that library it remained (when not out on loan) till Saturday, October
23, 1731. On that day a fire broke out in Ashburnham House in
Westminster (where the Cotton and Royal Libraries were then kept), and
the bookcase in which the Genesis was suffered horribly. The Cotton
MSS.--for I may as well explain this matter now as later--were kept in
presses, each of which had a bust of a Roman Emperor on the top. They
ran from Julius to Domitian, and were supplemented by Cleopatra and
Faustina. Augustus and Domitian had but one shelf each (Augustus
contained charters, drawings, and the like; Domitian was originally,
perhaps, a small case over a doorway); the others had usually six
shelves, lettered from A to F, and the books in each shelf were numbered
from i. onwards in Roman figures. The Genesis was Otho, B vi., and the
three presses of Galba, Otho, and Vitellius were those in which the fire
did most mischief. No complete leaf is left of Genesis; there are bits
of blackened text and pictures, a few of which strayed to the library of
the Baptist College at Bristol. The text had been examined by competent
scholars for editions of the Greek Old Testament, and we are able to
judge of its value; but of the pictures, alas! no list or description
had been made. Still, something is known. An eminent French polymath,
the Sieur de Peiresc (whose life by P. Gassendi is well worth reading),
borrowed the book from Cotton, and had careful copies of one or two of
the illustrations made for him, and these exist. And a further
interesting fact has come out: by the help of our scanty relics a
student of art, Professor Tikkanen, of Helsingfors, in Finland, was able
to show that the designers of a long series of mosaic pictures from
Genesis in St. Mark's at Venice must have had before them either the
Cotton Genesis or its twin sister, so closely do the mosaics follow the
compositions in the MS.
In somewhat similar fashion, by gift from the reformer Theodore de Béze,
the University of Cambridge acquired its greatest Greek treasure, the
Codex Bezæ (D) of the Gospels and Acts in Elizabeth's reign. The riddles
which its text presents have exercised many brains, and I do not know
who would allow that they are finally solved. Another famous MS., the
unique Lexicon of Photius, was acquired by Thomas Gale, Dean of York,
early in the eighteenth century--one would like to know where. To my eye
it bears signs of having been long in Western Europe, if not in England.
Roger Gale gave it, with his own and his father's other MSS., to Trinity
College, Cambridge, in 1738. On the whole, however, Cambridge has not
been nearly so fortunate as Oxford in accumulating Greek books. Oxford
had a magnificent present in 1629 from its Chancellor, the Earl of
Pembroke, of 240 MSS. purchased in block from the Venetian Barocci, and
in 1817 made a great and wise purchase of 128 more, contained in the
collection of another Venetian, the Abate Canonici. In the interval such
diverse benefactors as Laud and Cromwell had enriched it with some very
notable gifts. The pedigree of one of Laud's MSS. may be familiar, but
is too illuminating to be omitted. It is a seventh-century copy of the
Acts of the Apostles in Greek and Latin. The earliest home to which we
can trace it is Sardinia; a document connected with that island is
written on a fly-leaf. Then we find indisputable evidence that Bede,
writing early in the eighth century, had access to it; he quotes in his
_Retractations_ on the Acts readings which are characteristic of it; and
as he never left his monastery in the North, we may be sure that the
book was at Jarrow or Wearmouth in his time. After that it disappears
until Laud buys it. Like many of his books, it came to him from Germany,
a spoil of the Thirty Years' War. These various _data_ are best linked
up if we suppose (1) that the MS. was brought from Italy to England by
Theodore of Tarsus or his companion Abbot Hadrian in 668; (2) that it
was taken from England to Germany after Bede's death by one of the
companions of St. Boniface, the apostle of that country, and remained
there, in or near Fulda, perhaps, until the convulsion which threw it
back upon our shores.
Take another illustration. When John Leland, in Henry VIII.'s reign,
visited the library of Canterbury Cathedral, he saw there part of the
Old Testament in Greek--chiefly the poetical books and the Psalter. He
does not mention the Pentateuch. Nevertheless, it can be shown that that
was also there, for among the Canonici MSS. in the Bodleian is one of
the thirteenth century containing Genesis to Ruth in Greek, which has on
a margin the inscription, legible though erased: "liber ecclesie Christi
Cantuarie." How it left England at the Dissolution one may guess easily
enough, but what its fortunes were before it came to light again at
Venice I believe there is nothing to show.
* * * * *
Speaking broadly, then, of the destinies of Greek MSS., I may repeat
that they were produced in a comparatively small area, that a great many
of the most precious ones were concentrated in one place, and that from
the fourteenth century onwards they became objects of desire to the
great ones of the earth, who vied with each other in sending special
emissaries to collect them. As a result, the greatest treasures were
soon locked up in the libraries of princes and prelates, and became less
commonly exposed to dispersion and sale than Latin books. We must
remember, too, that as a rule the monasteries of Western Europe did not
collect Greek MSS.; they possessed a chance one here and there, as we
have seen, but rather as curiosities than as books to be used.[A] To
the noble and the scholar there was a flavour of distinction about a
Greek MS. which was wanting to all but the most venerable and beautiful
of the Latin ones.
There is still much to be done in the investigation of the history and
relationships of Greek MSS. In spite of the numberless editions of the
great authors, and the labour that has been lavished upon them, I
believe that scholars would agree that in very few cases, if any, is the
transmission of the text at all perfectly known. For some writings we
have too little MS. evidence, for some so much as to be embarrassing. In
no case can we afford to neglect and to leave unrecorded anything that a
MS. can tell us as to its place of origin, its scribe, or its owners.
Names and scribblings on fly-leaves, which to one student suggest
nothing, may combine in the memory of another into a coherent piece of
history, and show him the home of the book at a particular date, and by
consequence unveil a whole section of the story of its wanderings. With
one little instance of this kind I will bring to an end my remarks on
this first and shorter portion of my subject. In the library of Corpus
Christi College at Cambridge is a Greek Psalter written in the middle
of the twelfth century. On one of its last pages is scribbled in Greek
letters by a later hand the name of John Farley ("[Greek: Hiôhannês
pharlehi]"). Only about five-and-twenty volumes away from this stands a
MS. containing letters written by the University of Oxford on public
occasions. One of these is signed by J. Farley. A little enquiry elicits
the fact that John Farley was official scribe of that University near
the end of the fifteenth 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.