FullReads

William Flemming, Dean of Lincoln, and founder of Lincoln College, Oxford, gave a number of books to that society which show him to have been interested in the revival of learning; Greek MSS. are among them.

John Gunthorpe, Dean of Wells (d. 1498), is said by Leland to have bequeathed the large collection he brought from Italy to Jesus College, Cambridge. It is scattered and gone from there, but books of Gunthorpe’s survive in a good many libraries. One deserves special mention–a Latin prose version of the Odyssey, which he picked up (not in Italy, though it is an Italian book, but at Westminster) in 1475. Probably it was the first copy of the Odyssey in any form that had come to this country since Roman times, unless, indeed, Archbishop Theodore brought one over in the seventh century. Archbishop Parker thought that he had, and the MS. which he fondly believed to be Theodore’s was in his view the pearl of the collection he left to Corpus Christi. Certainly it has the name Theodorus in it in letters of gold; but, as certainly, it is a fifteenth-century book, and the Theodore for whom it was written was I believe Theodore Gaza, a humanist who lived in Italy.

An instance of a man interested in books and not unaffected by the Renaissance, though not himself a collector, may be introduced here. William Wyrcestre (or Botoner, or Worcester) is the man, and he deserves a special study. Some have called him the father of English antiquaries, in virtue of one of his notebooks which has been preserved, and which contains jottings about his travels in England; it is a sort of rude elementary Leland’s Itinerary. It is by no means the only book of his compiling, nor the only one owned by him that we have. There are historical and literary collections of his, and not a few MSS. with his name in them. He knew John Free, the translator (reputed) of Diodorus Siculus, and he had read Cristoforo Buondelmonte’s book on the islands of the Greek archipelago.

A long list of the Elizabethan book-collectors could be made, but I shall not attempt one here. Two libraries of the time, Sir Robert Cotton’s and Archbishop Parker’s, stand out. The main object of both men was to preserve English antiquities, and it is no exaggeration to say that if these two collections, which together number less than 1,500 volumes, had been wiped out, the best things in our vernacular literature and the pick of our chronicles would be unknown to us now. We should have no Beowulf or Judith, only inferior copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and of Matthew Paris, no Layamon, no Pearl–not to speak of the mass of invaluable State-papers gathered by Cotton, and the Reformation documents and letters stored up by Parker. One touch of blame rests on Sir Robert Cotton. He had a vicious habit of breaking up MSS. and binding together sections from different volumes. This disguises the provenance of the books, and by consequence obscures the history of their contents.

Enough information about the Cotton and Parker MSS. is easily accessible to absolve me from writing much about them here. Less is generally known of two dispersed collections, those of John Bale and John Dee.

Bale must, I fear, have been an unamiable man–certainly a very queer Christian. But his controversial works, on which he doubtless prided himself most, are dead and very rotten, while those devoted to the more peaceful science of bibliography are of abiding value. In his larger one, Scriptorum Britannicorum Centuriae, he inserts a list of the MSS. he had once owned; they were no longer in his hands, but, it is to be supposed, in Ireland, left there when he fled from his bishopric of Ossory on Mary’s accession. It is not a very scientific list, not one that gives the contents of each volume, but merely names of treatises, groups of which no doubt went to make up volumes, and this makes it difficult to determine how much of his library is in existence now. After his death it was in England, and a syndicate of Germans, including, as was said above, Flacius Illyricus, were negotiating for the purchase of it. Archbishop Parker also had an eye upon it; he had received books as gifts or loans from Bale in former years. I have not been able to make sure whether any of the books did actually go to the Continent; I doubt it, in fact. Many distinguished by Bale’s curious small, “flat” handwriting are traceable among Cotton’s and Parker’s books, at Lambeth, at Cambridge, and doubtless also at Oxford (where there is at least the MS. of his Index Scriptorum, admirably edited by Mr. R. L. Poole and Miss Bateson). Bale was a Carmelite in his youth and interested in the history of his Order, and there is an a priori probability that any book dealing with Carmelite affairs will contain marks of his ownership.