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Roman audience for books, the market for new books diminished, and the production of new books ceased. Scribes and artisans who had previously created new books, and the booksellers who hired them, probably had to find other occupations. Gradually, and probably at varying rates in different regions, the functions of writing lost importance in society or disappeared altogether, especially in the use of writing for governmental purposes. Reli- gious practice was the great exception. Though Christianity did not require literacy in ordinary believers, and it may have had a negative effect overall on literacy of the general populations with which it was concerned at this time,86 Christianity did make reading the sacred texts central to the lives of men and women in religious orders.
Over time the Roman senatorial class, diminished in size, recycled it- self into a Christian ecclesiastical class based in monasteries with scripto- ria for the production of the relatively small number of primarily religious manuscripts needed by the early monastic communities. Amidst this overall cultural decline and decay in Late Antiquity, there is evidence in the mid- fourth century of the origins of a papal library, ancestor of today’s Vati- can Library, organized at the Lateran Palace, the principal residence of the popes in Rome. The relative stability of the early church as an institution throughout these periods of social instability, and the church’s need to keep institutional records, as well as to maintain monastic libraries for preaching, study and teaching, was the motivation for most of book production in Europe, and the cause of the survival of many texts between Late Antiquity and the Carolingian Renewal in the ninth century.
As an example of the Roman senatorial class recycling into an ecclesiasti- cal class, the foundation of the scriptorium and library at the Vivarium by Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus was a notable development in Late Antiquity. A Roman Senator and former magister officiorum to Theodoric the Great, the Ostrogothic ruler of Rome, Cassiodorus retired and formed a school and monastery at his estate at the port of Squillace on the southern sole of Ita- ly’s boot in the region called by the Romans Magna Graecia. It received this
86 Harris, Ancient Literacy (1989), p. 326. 160