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copied and were discarded.93 An example is the earliest surviving manuscript of Plato, the so-called “Clarke Plato“ preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. From information within the codex we know that the scribe Johannes Calligraphus of Constantinople copied the Plato for Arethas of Patrae, later Archbishop of Caesarea in Cappadocia (central Turkey), owner of the best-known private library of the tenth century. Johannes completed the manuscript volume in November 895. The cost was 21 nomismata, or gold coins, for the copying and the parchment—a very high price, confirming that book collecting was the preserve of the rich at this time. Arethas and other contemporaries added scholia in uncial. The manuscript also contains annotations by many later hands. It is thought that this may be the first volume of a two-volume copy of the whole of Plato, the second volume of which has not been identified, or may be lost. Arethas is thought to have owned a few dozen volumes, of which, remarkably, eight volumes have sur- vived and been identified.94 Sometime between the inventory of 1382 and 1581-1582 the manuscript was purchased by the monastery of St. John on the island of Patmos. In 1801 E. D. Clarke purchased it from the monastery, and eventually donated it to the Bodleian Library.
G: Secularization of Book Production and Widening of the Book Market, Aided by the Invention of Spectacles, Causes Advances in the Form, Function, and Production of the Manuscript Book
Toward the end of the eleventh century, with the development of the first universities, monastic culture gradually began sharing its centuries-old mo- nopoly on education and book production with the secular world. Laying claim as the oldest university, the University of Bologna was founded in 1088. Oxford was founded about 1096, Cambridge in 1209, the University of Paris in 1257. As intellectual life began to be increasingly centered at the universities rather than monasteries, book production moved from the mo- nastic scriptoria to the secular communities near universities where schol-
93 Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars, 3rd ed. (1991), pp. 59-60.
94 Wilson, Scholars of Byzantium (1983), pp. 120-135.
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