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After the death of Cassiodorus the manuscripts at the Vivarium were dispersed; some of them found their way into the library maintained at the Lateran Palace in Rome by the Popes. As the Middle Ages advanced, knowledge of Greek became less and less common in European monasteries, though it flourished under Byzantine rule.
Until the development of universities in the twelfth and thirteenth centu- ries, the church, as the educator and civil service for the medieval tribal king- doms of Europe, maintained an almost complete monopoly on education and book production. This production was virtually entirely in Latin, with only a very few manuscripts in Greek present in the libraries of Western Eu- rope until the thirteenth century.89 As one would expect, most of the books produced in monasteries concerned religion, but works of a secular nature were also required for the functioning of a monastic community. Partly because so few early codices survived from Late Antiquity to the year 799, between 1934 and 1992 paleographer E. A. Lowe, and his successor to the project, Bernhard Bischoff, were able to publish a comprehensive catalogue of 1884 surviving codices and fragments written in Latin from 350 to 799 in Codices Latini Antiquiores and its supplements. In 1954 Albert Bruckner and Robert Marichal began publication of the Chartae Latinae Antiquiores, which was intended as a supplement to Lowe’s work. The Chartae Latinae Antiquiores constitutes a catalogue of the large number of Latin manuscripts other than codices, written on papyrus or parchment, which antedate 800 CE. The 49th and last volume in this series appeared in 1997. Statistics from Lowe’s Codices Latini Antiquiores were compiled in the German Wikipedia article on Codices Latini Antiquiores and presented in four graphics posted on that site.
From the graphic showing “Distribution of Transmitted Codices by Time and Content,” we see that in the Late Antiquity of the fifth century, and the afterglow of Roman culture, pagan texts represent 31 out of the only 113 surviving codices, or about 25%. By the year 500, which has been called the
89 See Berschin, “6 Greek Manuscripts in Western Libraries,” Greek Letters and the Latin Middle Ages: From Jerome to Nicholas of Cusa, translated by J. C. Frakes. Revised and expanded edition. http://www. myriobiblos.gr/texts/english/Walter_Berschin_16.html accessed 01-01-2011).
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