Page 161 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

name after its intensive colonization by Greeks in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE. Cassiodorus named his monastery the Vivarium after the fishponds which were a “feature of its civilized lifestyle.” The monastery included a scriptorium, intended to collect, copy, and preserve texts. This monastery in a Greek-speaking region of Italy, established at the very close of the Classical period, has been called the final effort to bring Greek learning to Latin readers. Even so, most of the writing in the monastery was in Lat- in. At the Vivarium Cassiodorus had monks produce a vast pandect of the Bible called the Codex Grandior. He also had them copy out his own work, Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum. Along with detailed instruction for a religious routine, this work explained how manuscripts should be han- dled, corrected, copied, and repaired, and included what amounted to an annotated bibliography of the best literature of the time. Cassiodorus also stated “that biblical manuscripts should be bound in covers worthy of their contents, and he added that he had provided a pattern book with specimens of different kinds of bindings.”87 This may be the earliest detailed reference to bookbinding.
From Cassiodorus’s writings we know that the Vivarium library possessed 231 codices of 92 different authors, pagan works as well as Christian studies, apparently arranged by subject in at least ten armaria (book cupboards). It included five codices on medical subjects, including the works of Hippo- crates, Galen, Dioscorides, Celsus and Caelius Aurelianus. 88 Much attention is always given to the library of Cassiodorus in discussing the book history of this period because the Vivarium contained the only library of the sixth century of which we have definite knowledge, reflective of both the cultural decline during Late Antiquity, and also undoubtedly of the loss of so many records. Besides that, a library of 231 codices would have been exceptionally large for the time.
87 Graham Pollard, Early Bookbinding Manuals (1984), p. 1.
88 Capparoni, “Magistri Salernitani Nondum Cogniti”: A Contribution to the History of the Medical School of
Salerno (1923), p. 3.
161