Stupidity; censorship; changes in format and changes in taste; war; and of course the inevitable accidents, especially flood and fire. Such are the hazards to the frail life of books. Ultimately, there is power in an ancient book both as work of art and thought, kept alive by people who loved books and knew that books are an essential element in civilization. When barbarism comes to outweigh culture, through foreign invasion or social revolution or deliberately nurtured through sloth and ignorance, works of art are often taken to be “useless” and destroyed. In waves of materialism and in revolutions, everything old is apt to be judged obsolete. It is a barrier to progress; or it is lumber; or it is reactionary; or it is indelible and unspendable.
The Italian writer Giovanni Boccaccio paid a celebrated visit to the monastery of Monte Cassino, in most probably the winter of 1370. According to one of his disciples, he wept in despair at the neglect of its once-great library and was given some books to take back to Florence with him. It has been suggested that he smuggled them out. Image:http://faratarazclossium.blogfa.com/post-31.aspx
And so it has always been. Boccaccio, who was a great booklover and book finder, once visited the monastery of Monte Cassino. He was particularly eager to see the library, with all its treasures of handwritten books. Very humbly he asked one of the monks for admission to it. “Walk up” , said the monk, “it’s open.” It was. It had no door; grass was grwoing on the window sills; the shelves, the benches, and the books themselves were shrouded in thick dust. Some of them, he found, had lost pages or even whole quires, others had their margins cut off. Boccaccio wept. He cried tears of pity ” that the work and study of so many illustrious geniuses should have fallen into the hands of scoundrels.” As he left, he asked a monk how such valuable books could have been so odiously mutilated. “Well,” said the monk, “some of the brothers wanted to earn a few pennies: so they took a page and scraped off the writing and made little psalters to sell to children; and from the page margins they made gospels and breviaries and sold them to women.”
---Ulrich Richental: Chronik des Konstanzer Concils New York, The New York Public Library, Spencer Collection Ms. 32 1460s /Not of Hungarian provenance, but significant for its illustrations of the Council of Constance, 1414-1418. Images of king Sigismund abound, also coats of arms of Hungarian participants. One of the earliest surviving copies of the manuscript/---Read More:http://home.hu.inter.net/~jekely/treasures.htm
When a bibliophile sees good books neglected and on the road to destruction, his first impulse is to rescue them. Say not “steal.” Some splendid books from Monte Cassino are now in Florence. If it was not Boccaccio who “conveyed” them there, it was an even more fanatical booklover, Niccolo Niccoli; or an agent of his and of the house of Medici. One of these manuscripts alone- bless the hand that saved it- is the only surviving book that contains Tacitus’s account of the civil war after Nero’s suicide and of the reigns of Claudius and Nero; it also has Apuleius’s wonderful romance, The Metamorphoses, sometimes called The Golden Ass. This magnificent Codex, written in the eleventh century , now rests peacefully in the Laurentian library, above the cloister of the church of San Lorenzo.
---The Latin herbal associated with the name of Apuleius Barbarus or Apuleius Platonicus or Pseudo-Apuleius, in distinction to Lucius Apuleius Platonicus, author of The Golden Ass, may have been put together from Greek material around 400 CE or might have been compiled earlier, possibly in Roman Africa. Nothing is known about the so-called author except his name, which may have actually been a pseudonym of Lucius Apuleius Platonicus, who described himself as "half-Numidian half-Gaetulian," and who was born in Madaurus (now M'Daourouch, Algeria), a Roman colony in Numidia on the North African coast, bordering Gaetulia.---Read More:http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php?category=Medicine
Near it is the only surviving manuscript of the first six books of another work by Tacitus, the Annals, found in Germany. Had these two manuscripts not been “conveyed” they might well have been cut up into amulets, and we should have lost one of the greatest historians who ever wrote of absolutism and the degeneracy of despotic power.
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