survey of this sort. With the fall of Rome and the wholesale destruction
that accompanied the barbarian invasions a new chapter begins in the
history of the dissemination of literature. This chapter opens with the
founding of the scriptorium, or monastic copying system, by Cassiodorus
and Saint Benedict early in the sixth century. To these two men,
Cassiodorus, the ex-chancellor of the Gothic king Theodoric, and
Benedict, the founder of the Benedictine order, is due the gratitude of
the modern world. It was through their foresight in setting the monks at
work copying the scriptures and the secular literature of antiquity that
we owe the preservation of most of the books that have survived the
ruins of the ancient world. At the monastery of Monte Cassino, founded
by Saint Benedict in the year 529, and at that of Viviers, founded by
Cassiodorus in 531, the Benedictine rule required of every monk that a
fixed portion of each day be spent in the scriptorium. There the more
skilled scribes were entrusted with the copying of precious documents
rescued from the chaos of the preceding century, while monks not yet
sufficiently expert for this high duty were instructed by their
superiors.

The example thus nobly set was imitated throughout all the centuries
that followed, not only in the Benedictine monasteries of Italy, France,
Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Iceland, but in religious houses of
all orders. It is to the mediaeval Church, her conservatism in the true
sense of the word, her industry, her patience, her disinterested
guardianship alike of sacred and of pagan letters, that the world owes
most of our knowledge of antiquity. Conceive how great would be our loss
if to archaeology alone we could turn for the reconstruction of the
civilization, the art, the philosophy, the public and private life of
Greece and Rome. If the Church had done no more than this for
civilization, it would still have earned some measure of tolerance from
its most anti-clerical opponents. It is of course to the Eastern rather
than to the Roman Church that we owe the preservation of classical Greek
literature, copied during the dark ages in Greek monasteries and
introduced into Italy after the fall of Constantinople.

A second stage in the multiplication and publication of manuscript books
begins with the founding of the great mediaeval universities of Bologna,
Paris, Padua, Oxford, and other centers of higher education. Inasmuch as
the stud