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dence, though undoubtedly the number of scribes producing books would have gradually diminished in response to printing. It has been estimated that nearly as many manuscripts written in the second half of the fifteenth century have survived as those which are thought to have been written in the first half of the fifteenth century, reflecting a continuity of manuscript copying, even as it was being gradually superseded by the new technology.40
Scribes who could write in Greek remained in high demand, as in spite of the increasing demands of humanists for Greek texts, printing in Greek got a late start. This is understandable considering that, with exceptions, Greek had mainly disappeared from literacy in Europe during the Middle Ages and was only gradually revived in Italy beginning in the fourteenth century, becoming of increasing interest to humanists in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Exceptions included the native Greek-speaking commu- nities of Magna Graecia in southern Italy, where monasteries continued to produce Greek manuscripts of the Bible, patristic literature, the liturgy, and even classical texts, mainly for their own use.41 Obviously, in the early years
40 See the considerable discussion of this issue in Buehler, The Fifteenth Century Book: The Scribes, The Printers, The Decorators (1960), pp. 24-39.
41 “For Christians, Greek was not only the language of the Bible, it was also the language of the liturgy. The first Christians in the West held their religious services in Greek, and even though Latin gradually replaced Greek in the liturgy, some remnants of Greek survived in the Western rites until modern times, as for example in the kyrie eleison. Many Latin missals and prayer books of the Middle Ages preserve some Greek prayers and hymns. Through the liturgy the medieval West maintained an uninterrupted acquaintance with Greek. Many Greek terms were adopted by the Latin church (for example, ecclesia, basilica, baptismus). The need to understand such terminology, and the desire to compre- hend the Greek quotations in ancient and patristic authors required that scholars in the West acquire at least some knowledge of Greek. There is some surviving evidence for how they accomplished this. A number of manuscripts from Western schoolrooms preserve Greek alphabets, from which scribes could learn to write Greek, perhaps to enable them to copy the Greek passages they encountered in patristic texts. Greek-Latin glossaries and word lists provided a rudimentary understanding of Greek vocabulary. Such basic resources kept Greek alive in the Western schools, at least at the most elementary level. On a more sophistical level, translations from ancient and patristic Greek authors continued to be made in the West. Aristotle remained a favorite, and he was translated from the Greek by scholars like Jacobus Veneticus in the twelfth century, and Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth . . .” (Babcock & Sosower, Learning from the Greeks: An Exhibition Commemorating the Five-Hundredth Anniversary of the Founding of the Aldine Press [at the Beinecke Library, Yale], 1994).
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