Page 166 - Virtual Research Lab flip book

From the Byzantine empire, in which Greek was by far the predominant language, only Latin codices survive from the fifth to the eighth century. Finally, only six codices produced in Africa survived, though some may be among the earliest survivals.
From the graphic entitled “Migration of Codices,” we observe that rough- ly half of the production of each of the main producing countries, except Switzerland, remained in those countries; the rest migrated to other coun- tries in Europe. Only Switzerland appears to have been sufficiently isolated from the other countries during its single century of production that none of its manuscripts found their way to monasteries beyond its own borders.
F. The Carolingian Renewal and the Recopying of Codices in Minuscule
The secular and ecclesiastical administration of a vast empire called for a large number of trained priests and functionaries. As the only common denominator in a heterogeneous realm and as the repository of both the classical and the Christian heritage of an earlier age, the Church was the obvious means of implement- ing the educational program necessary to produce a trained exec- utive. But under the Merovingians the Church had fallen on evil days; some of the priests were so ignorant of Latin that Boniface heard one carrying out a baptism of dubious efficacy in nomine patria et filia et spiritus sancti (Epist. 68), and knowledge of antiquity had worn so thin that the author of one sermon was under the unfortunate impression that Venus was a man. Reform had be- gun under [Charlemagne’s father] Pippin the Short; but now the need was greater, and Charlemagne felt a strong personal respon- sibility to raise the intellectual level of the clergy, and through them of his subjects. . . . (Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd ed. [1991], pp. 92-93).
Before Gutenberg, the people among the most influential in the early history of the book are the Emperor Charlemagne and the director of Char- lemagne’s education program, the monk Alcuin. Charlemagne’s success as
166