Since papyrus was no longer available and paper did not come into general use until the fourteenth century, for more than a thousand years the chief writing material used for books was made from the skins of animals—cows, sheep, goats, and occasionally deer. These surfaces needed to be made smooth, and hence another tool that the monastic librarian distributed was pumice stone, to rub away the remaining animal hair along with any bumps or imperfections. The scribe to whom a poor-quality parchment had been given was in for a very disagreeable task, and in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress: “The parchment is hairy”19 … “Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text” … “Thank God, it will soon be dark.” “Let the copyist be permitted to put an end to his labor,” a weary monk wrote beneath his name, the date, and the place where he worked; “Now I’ve written20 the whole thing,” wrote another. “For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”
The finest parchment, the one that made life easier for scribes and must have figured in their sweetest dreams, was made of calfskin and called vellum. And the best of the lot was uterine vellum, from the skins of aborted calves. Brilliantly white, smooth, and durable, these skins were reserved for the most precious books, ones graced with elaborate, gemlike miniatures and occasionally encased in covers encrusted with actual gems. The libraries of the world still preserve a reasonable number of these remarkable objects, the achievement of scribes who lived seven or eight hundred years ago and labored for untold hours to create something beautiful.
Good scribes were exempted from certain times of collective prayer, in order to maximize the hours of daylight in the scriptorium. And they did not have to work at night: because of an entirely justifiable fear of fire, all candlelight was forbidden. But for the time—about six hours a day—that they actually spent at their desks, their lives belonged entirely to their books. It was possible, in certain monasteries at least, to hope that monks would understand what they were copying: “Vouchsafe, O Lord,21 to bless this workroom of Thy servants,” declared the dedication of one scriptorium, “that all which they write therein may be comprehended by their intelligence and realized in their works.” But the actual interest of the scribes in the books they copied (or their distaste for those books) was strictly irrelevant. Indeed, insofar as the copying was a form of discipline—an exercise in humility and a willing embrace of pain—distaste or simple incomprehension might be preferable to engagement. Curiosity was to be avoided at all costs.
The complete subordination of the monastic scribe to the text—the erasure, in the interest of crushing the monk’s spirit, of his intellect and sensibility—could not have been further from Poggio’s own avid curiosity and egotism. But he understood that his passionate hope of recovering reasonably accurate traces of the ancient past depended heavily on this subordination. An engaged reader, Poggio knew, was prone to alter his text in order to get it to make sense, but such alterations, over centuries, inevitably led to wholesale corruptions. It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all.
A sheet with a cutout window generally covered the page of the manuscript being copied, so that the monk had to focus on one line at a time. And monks were strictly forbidden to change what they thought were mistakes in the texts they were copying. They could correct only their own slips of the pen by carefully scraping off the ink with a razor and repairing the spot with a mixture of milk, cheese, and lime, the medieval version of our own product for whiting out mistakes. There was no crumpling up the page and starting afresh. Though the skins of sheep and goats were plentiful, the process of producing parchment from them was laborious. Good parchment was far too valuable and scarce to be discarded. This value helps to account for the fact that monasteries collected ancient manuscripts in the first place and did not consign them to the rubbish.
To be sure, there were a certain number of abbots and of monastic librarians who treasured not only the parchment but also the pagan works written on them. Steeped in classical literature, some believed that they could rifle its treasures without contamination, the way the ancient Hebrews had been permitted by God to steal the riches of the Egyptians. But over the generations, as a substantial Christian literature was created, it became less easy to make such an argument. Fewer and fewer monks were inclined, in any case, to make it. Between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century, Greek and Latin classics virtually ceased to be copied at all. What had begun as an active campaign to forget—a pious attack on pagan ideas—had evolved into actual forgetting. The ancient poems, philosophical treatises, and political speeches, at one time so threatening and so alluring, were no longer in anyone’s mind, let alone on anyone’s lips. They had been reduced to the condition of mute things, sheets of parchment, stitched together, covered with unread words.
Only the remarkable durability of the parchment used in these codices kept the ideas of the ancients alive at all, and, as the humanist book hunters knew, even strong material was no guarantee of survival. Working with knives,22 brushes, and rags, monks often carefully washed away the old writings—Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius—and wrote in their place the texts that they were instructed by their superiors to copy. The task must have been a tiresome one, and, for the very rare scribe who actually cared about the work he was erasing, an excruciating one.
If the original ink proved tenacious, it could still be possible to make out the traces of the texts that were written over: a unique fourth-century copy of Cicero’s On the Republic remained visible beneath a seventh-century copy of St. Augustine’s meditation on the Psalms; the sole surviving copy of Seneca’s book on friendship was deciphered beneath an Old Testament inscribed in the late sixth century. These strange, layered manuscripts—called palimpsests; from the Greek for “scraped again”—have served as the source of several major works from the ancient past that would not otherwise be known. But no medieval monk would have been encouraged to read, as it were, between the lines.
The monastery was a place of rules, but in the scriptorium there were rules within rules. Access was denied to all non-scribes. Absolute silence reigned. Scribes were not allowed to choose the particular books that they copied or to break the dead silence by requesting aloud from the librarian such books as they might wish to consult in order to complete the task that had been assigned them. An elaborate gestural language was invented in order to facilitate such requests as were permitted. If a scribe wanted to consult a psalter, he made the general sign for a book—extending his hands and turning over imaginary pages—and then, by putting his hands on his head in the shape of a crown, the specific sign for the psalms of King David. If he was asking for a pagan book, he began, after making the general sign, to scratch behind his ear, like a dog scratching his fleas. And if he wished to have what the Church regarded as a particularly offensive or dangerous pagan book, he could put two fingers into his mouth, as if he were gagging.
Poggio was a layman, part of a very different world. His precise destination in 1417, after he parted ways with Bartolomeo, is not known—perhaps like a prospector hiding the location of his mine, he deliberately withheld its name from his letters. There were dozens of monasteries to which he might have gone in the hope of turning up something remarkable, but many scholars have long thought that the likeliest candidate is the Benedictine Abbey of Fulda.23 That abbey, in a strategic area of central Germany, between the Rhône and the Vogelsberg Mountains, had the features that most excited the interest of a book hunter: it was ancient, it was rich, it had once possessed a great tradition of learning, and it was now in decline.
If it was Fulda that he approached, Poggio could not afford to seem overbearing. Founded in the eighth century by a disciple of the Apostle of Germany, St. Boniface, the abbey was unusually independent. Its abbot was a prince of the Holy Roman Empire: when he walked in procession, an armor-clad knight carried the imperial banner befo
re him, and he had the privilege of sitting at the left hand of the emperor himself. Many of the monks were German nobles—men who would have had a very clear sense of the respect that was due to them. If the monastery had lost some of the prestige it once enjoyed and had been forced in the not too distant past to part with some of its immense territories, it nonetheless was a force to reckon with. With his modest birth and very limited means, Poggio, the former apostolic secretary of a disgraced and deposed pope, had few cards to play.
Rehearsing in his mind his little speech of introduction, Poggio would have dismounted and walked up the tree-lined avenue toward the abbey’s single, heavy gate. From the outside Fulda resembled a fortress; indeed, in the preceding century, in a bitter dispute with the burghers of the adjacent city, it had been violently attacked. Inside, like most monasteries, it was strikingly self-sufficient. By January the extensive vegetable, flower, and botanical gardens were in their winter sleep, but the monks would have carefully harvested what they could store for the long, dark months, taking special care to gather the medicinal herbs that would be used in the infirmary and the communal bath. The granaries at this point in the winter would have still been reasonably full, and there would have been ample straw and oats for the horses and donkeys in the stables. Looking around, Poggio would have taken in the chicken coops, the covered yard for sheep, the cowshed with its smell of manure and fresh milk, and the large pigsties. He might have felt a pang for the olives and the wine of Tuscany, but he knew that he would not go hungry. Past the mills and the oil press, past the great basilica and its adjacent cloister, past the houses for the novices, the dormitory, the servants’ quarters, and the pilgrims’ hospice where he and his assistant would be lodged, Poggio would have been led to the abbot’s house to meet the ruler of this little kingdom.
In 1417, if Fulda was indeed Poggio’s destination, that ruler was Johann von Merlau. After greeting him humbly, explaining something about himself, and presenting a letter of recommendation from a well-known cardinal, Poggio would almost certainly have begun by expressing his interest in glimpsing the precious relics of St. Boniface and saying a prayer in their holy presence. His life, after all, was full of such observances: bureaucrats in the papal court routinely began and ended their days with prayers. And if nothing in his letters suggests a particular interest in relics or the intervention of saints or the rituals employed to reduce the soul’s painful time in Purgatory, Poggio nonetheless would have known upon what possessions Fulda most prided itself.
The visitor would then as a special favor have been led into the basilica. If he had not already taken it in, Poggio would certainly have realized, as he entered the transept and walked down the stairs into the dark, vaulted crypt, that Fulda’s pilgrimage church seemed strangely familiar: it was directly modeled after Rome’s fourth-century Basilica of St. Peter’s. (The vast St. Peter’s in Rome today was built long after Poggio’s death.) There by candlelight, enshrined in a rich setting of gold, crystal, and jewels, he would have seen the bones of the saint, massacred in 754 by the Frisians he was struggling to convert.
When he and his hosts emerged once again into the light and when he deemed that he had reached the appropriate moment, Poggio would have nudged the conversation toward his actual purpose in coming. He could have done so by initiating a discussion of one of Fulda’s most celebrated figures, Rabanus Maurus, who had served as abbot for two decades, from 822 to 842. Rabanus Maurus was a prolific author of biblical commentaries, doctrinal treatises, pedagogical guides, scholarly compendia, and a series of fantastically beautiful poems in cipher. Most of these works Poggio could easily have seen in the Vatican Library, along with the vast tome for which Rabanus was best known: a work of stupefying erudition and dullness that attempted to bring together in its twenty-two books all of human knowledge. Its title was De rerum naturis—“On the Natures of Things”—but contemporaries, acknowledging the scope of its ambition, called it “On the Universe.”
The works of the ninth-century monk epitomized the heavy, plodding style that Poggio and his fellow humanists despised. But he also recognized that Rabanus Maurus was an immensely learned man, steeped in pagan as well as Christian literature, and that he had transformed Fulda’s monastic school into the most important in Germany. As all schools do, the one at Fulda needed books, and Rabanus had met the need by greatly enriching the monastic library. Rabanus, who as a young man24 had studied with Alcuin, the greatest scholar of the age of Charlemagne, knew where to get his hands on important manuscripts. He had them brought to Fulda, where he trained a large cohort of scribes to copy them. And so he had built what was for the time a stupendous collection.
That time, some six hundred years before Poggio, was from the book hunter’s perspective highly propitious. It was far enough into the past to hold out the possibility of a link to a more distant past. And the gradual decline over the centuries in the monastery’s intellectual seriousness only intensified the excitement. Who knew what was sitting on those shelves, untouched perhaps for centuries? Tattered manuscripts that had chanced to survive the long nightmare of chaos and destruction, in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, might well have found their way to remote Fulda. Rabanus’s monks could have made the scratching or gagging sign for pagan books to copy, and those copies, having fallen into oblivion, would be awaiting the humanist’s revivifying touch.
Such, in any case, was Poggio’s ardent hope, in Fulda or wherever he found himself, and his pulse must have quickened when at last he would have been led by the monastery’s chief librarian into a large vaulted room and shown a volume attached by a chain to the librarian’s own desk. The volume was a catalogue, and as he pored over its pages, Poggio pointed—for the rule of silence in the library was strictly observed—to the books he wanted to see.
Genuine interest, as well as a sense of discretion, might have dictated that Poggio request first to see unfamiliar works by one of the greatest Church Fathers, Tertullian. Then, as the manuscripts were brought to his desk, he plunged, with what must have been increasing excitement, into a series of ancient Roman authors whose works were utterly unknown to him and to any of his fellow humanists. Though Poggio did not reveal precisely where he went, he did reveal—indeed, he trumpeted—what he had found. For what all book hunters dreamed of was actually happening.
He opened an epic poem in some 14,000 lines on the wars between Rome and Carthage. Poggio might have recognized the name of the author, Silius Italicus, though until this moment none of his works had surfaced. A canny politician and a wily, unscrupulous orator, who served as a tool in a succession of show trials, Silius had managed to survive the murderous reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian. In retirement, the younger Pliny had written with urbane irony, he “obliterated by the praiseworthy use25 he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.” Now Poggio and his friends would be able to savor one of the fruits of this leisure.
He opened another long poem, this one by an author, Manilius, whose name the book hunter would certainly not have recognized, for it is not mentioned by any surviving ancient author. Poggio saw at once that it was a learned work on astronomy, and he would have been able to tell from the style and from the poet’s own allusions that it had been written at the very beginning of the empire, during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius.
More ghosts surged up from the Roman past. An ancient literary critic who had flourished during Nero’s reign and had written notes and glosses on classical authors; another critic who quoted extensively from lost epics written in imitation of Homer; a grammarian who wrote a treatise on spelling that Poggio knew his Latin-obsessed friends in Florence would find thrilling. Yet another manuscript was a discovery whose thrill might have been tinged for him with melancholy: a large fragment of a hitherto unknown history of the Roman Empire written by a high-ranking officer in the imperial army, Ammianus Marcellinus. The melancholy would have arisen not only from the fact that the first thirteen of t
he original thirty-one books were missing from the manuscript Poggio copied by hand—and these lost books have never been found—but also from the fact that the work was written on the eve of the empire’s collapse. A clearheaded, thoughtful, and unusually impartial historian, Ammianus seems to have sensed the impending end. His description of a world exhausted by crushing taxes, the financial ruin of large segments of the population, and the dangerous decline in the army’s morale vividly conjured up the conditions that made it possible, some twenty years after his death, for the Goths to sack Rome.
Even the smallest of the finds that Poggio was making was highly significant—for anything at all to surface after so long seemed miraculous—but they were all eclipsed, from our own perspective if not immediately, by the discovery of a work still more ancient than any of the others that he had found. One of the manuscripts consisted of a long text written around 50 BCE by a poet and philosopher named Titus Lucretius Carus. The text’s title, De rerum natura—On the Nature of Things—was strikingly similar to the title of Rabanus Maurus’s celebrated encyclopedia, De rerum naturis. But where the monk’s work was dull and conventional, Lucretius’ work was dangerously radical.
Poggio would almost certainly have recognized the name Lucretius from Ovid, Cicero, and other ancient sources he had painstakingly pored over, in the company of his humanist friends, but neither he nor anyone in his circle26 had encountered more than a scrap or two of his actual writing, which had, as far as anyone knew, been lost forever.