This Business About Thanking The Monks

A somewhat confused and silly person accused me of not knowing what an analogy is, because I objected to the analogy: "The printing press was the Internet of the 16th century." He concluded a report on the dissemination via printing press of the Bible in the 16th century with the non-sequitor, "If you can read, thank a monk."

I have nothing at all against the individual monks who copied, for instance, Ovid's "Metamorphoses," an ancient Latin poem I like quite a lot. On the contrary, I suspect that some of those monks may have stuck their necks out a bit, or possibly even risked punishment, by disobeying orders in order to make manuscripts of the "Metamorphoses" instead of something more strictly Christian. Or the copyists may have been reluctant in certain cases, and it may have been their superiors, abbots or bishops, who were the enthusiastic Classicists and ordered the copies of Ovid's great poem to be made. Either way, as an enthusiastic (amateur) Classicist myself, I naturally appreciate the efforts of Western Medieval Classicists. All of whom were clergypeople.

But to thank a monk for the survival of classical literature -- let alone for my ability to read at all -- that is, to thank any monk for it -- every monk -- is beyond the beyond, as Pete Townshend would say. That would be, in effect, to thank Christianity for having preserved civilization. I already told Sir Kenneth Clark in a previous Wrong Monkey blog post what he could do with that notion. Apart from my objection to the extremely narrow and xenophobic definition of culture put forward by Clark, and also by some Catholic apologists who really seem to believe that the Middle Ages were a glorious time, when I am thankful to those individual Medieval Classicists who made copies of the works of Ovid and Sallust and Horace and the other pre-Christian writers I love, I do not feel that I am thanking them for doing something inherently Christian. On the contrary, I think I'm thanking them for having gone against the grain of Christianity, and having prevented Christianity from completely destroying all traces of Classical Greek and Rome, instead of only destroying most traces as it did.

I'm going to make an analogy here, to demonstrate that I do too know what an analogy is, and also to refute this absurd notion that if you can read, you should thank a monk. On the one hand, part of me thinks that the notion is much, much too absurd to need refuting; on the other hand, such notions have been advanced by people like Sir Kenneth Clark, who besides his cushy day job advising the British royal family on matters of art was allowed to make a public-television series whose format was comparable to the series of Carl Sagan and Dr Bleedin' Bronowski, as if his ideas were on a par with theirs, and by other people who often can not only, so it seems, dress themselves and walk about more or less upright on their hind limbs, but are also full professors and successful authors, in short: it seems to need refuting.

Imagine if between 1741 and 1993, in all of the lands of the British Commonwealth and in the US, only WASP's had been allowed to operate printing presses or websites or own bookstores or otherwise sell or distribute printed works. In this imaginary analogous past, other ethnicities were allowed to write, but if they were going to write for a public, all of the stages of publishing and dissemination of their works were going to be controlled by WASP's. Imagine if someone today in that alternate universe told you that if you can read you should thank a WASP, because of those 252 years when WASP's had a tight monopoly upon the printed word in certain countries. Thanking a monk for being able to read is no less ridiculous, no less insulting to the world outside of the party which for a certain time and in a certain area was allowed to tightly, rigidly control literacy. Literacy began long before there were Christian monks, it thrived all over the world in regions which until recently had never heard of Jesus. It's hard to know for sure about such things, but it seems clear that literacy rates within the Roman Empire declined sharply after the Christian takeover. Apologists blame the illiterate hordes from Northern Europe and Asia; I blame the Christians, who demonized all non-Christian writing and discouraged the masses from reading even the Bible. I think it's quite obvious where the blame belongs, if people will inform themselves about what happened, and if they are able to consider events without absolutely qrotesque levels of prejudice.

Livy

There are so many things I don't know. For instance: how many people could read Latin in the Roman Republic and Empire, and then in Western Europe after the fall of the Western Empire? We tend to assume that the numbers dropped drastically between the Classical era and the Dark Ages, but is this true, or is it more the case that a large illiterate demographic of Germanic peoples are more prominent in our backward historical gaze, while the actual Romans remained as literate as before, although less powerful?

Has the total number of people at any given time who could read Latin ever been in the millions? Has the number actually declined over the past couple of centuries, or does it only seem smaller because it represents a smaller percentage of the much greater number of people who now have attended universities?

For some works of Classical Latin there have survived hundreds of manuscripts, some have disappeared, perhaps never to be recovered, some are represented today by a single manuscript. Does the number of manuscripts known to us today tell us anything about the past popularity of a given text? I wonder. Books xli-xlv of Livy's ab urbe condita, his history of Rome from its mythical beginnings down to his own time during the reign of Augustus, appeared to have vanished when in 1527 Simon Grynaeus found them in a 5th-century codex in a monestary in Switzerland. Before 1527 30 of Livy's 142 books -- think of books of the Bible, Livy's books are of a roughly comparable length -- were known to the public, since Grynaeus' discovery it's been 35, plus a few small fragments which have since come to light here and there, and two compilationd from the 4th century AD, an anonymous summary or periochae, and a listing by a certain Julius Obsequens of all the "prodigies" -- natural disasters, plagues, eclipses and so forth -- mentioned in the entire work. And yet the mentions of Livy in other ancient, medieval and modern texts seem to indicate that he was consistently one of the most highly-regarded, widely read of all Classical authors.

But that's yet another speculation on my part, inferring a rough idea of the comparative size of dimensions of Livy's total readership based on some comments here and there. For all I know, some other writers in ancient Rome could've been much more popular than Livy, writers about whom no-one today knows anything, because the interest in them died out quickly, and the people who may have written mentions of them were themselves not considered interesting, and so their writings too were lost. A lot can get lost in 2,000 years, lost or destroyed or forgotten. Or just misplaced, like that 5th-century copy of Livy's books xli-xlv. The volume may have lain on that shelf in that monastery in Switzerland for centuries without so much as being touched.

How many other interesting old manuscripts are just laying around, with a race going on, a very very slow race between someone eventually finding them, by design or accident, and them rotting away?

Again: I really have no idea at all. I'd like to see Livy's work restored to its full 142 books. I'd love to discover some of the missing material myself, but there's an entire branch of a learned profession in line in front of me in terms of being likely to make such a find. How likely is it that anybody will ever find anything more of Livy's work?

Again: I. Really. Just. Don't. Know.

The authors of the anthology Texts and Transmission, ed by L D Reynolds, are very bright and learned, and have much more exact ideas about the possibilities and probabilities involved in such things than I.