The Swerve

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Books were scarce and valuable. They conferred prestige on the monastery that possessed them, and the monks were not inclined to let them out of their sight, particularly if they had any prior experience with light-fingered Italian humanists. On occasion monasteries tried to secure their possession by freighting their precious manuscripts with curses. “For him that stealeth,12 or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner,” one of these curses runs,

  let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

  Even a worldly skeptic, with a strong craving for what he had in his hands, might have hesitated before slipping such a book into his cloak.

  If the monks were poor or perhaps simply venal, they could be offered some money to part with their books, but the very interest showed by a stranger would inevitably make the price soar. It was always possible to ask the abbot to allow a manuscript to be carried off, with a solemn promise that it would be shortly returned. But though exceptionally trusting or naive abbots existed, they were few and far between. There was no way to compel assent, and if the answer was no, the whole venture was a dead loss. As a last resort, one could always defy curses and try theft, of course, but monastic communities were cultures of surveillance. Visitors would be watched particularly carefully, the gates were shut and locked at night, and some of the brothers were stout churls who would not scruple to beat an apprehended thief to within an inch of his life.

  Poggio was almost uniquely suited to meet these challenges. He had been exceptionally well trained in the special skills needed to decipher old handwriting. He was a wonderfully gifted Latinist, with a particularly acute eye for the telltale diction, rhetorical devices, and grammatical structures of classical Latin. He had read widely and attentively in the literature of antiquity and had committed to his capacious memory the dozens of clues that hinted at the identity of particular authors or works that had been lost. He was not himself a monk or a priest, but his long service in the papal curia or court had given him intimate, inside knowledge of the institutional structures of the Church, as well as personal acquaintance with many of its most powerful clerics, including a succession of popes.

  If even these exalted connections should prove insufficient to get him through the locked doors that led to a remote abbey’s library, Poggio also possessed considerable personal charm. He was a marvelous raconteur, a sly gossip, and an indefatigable teller of jokes, many of them off-color. He could not, to be sure, converse with the German monks in their native language. Though he had lived for more than three years in a German-speaking city, by his own account he had learned no German. For so gifted a linguist, this ignorance seems to have been willed: German was the language of the barbarians, and Poggio evidently had no interest in acquiring it. In Constance he probably cocooned himself almost entirely in a Latin- and Italian-speaking social world.

  But if a failure to speak German must have been vexing on the road, at inns or other way stations, it would not have posed a serious problem once Poggio had arrived at his destination. The abbot, the librarian, and many other members of the monastic community would have spoken Latin. They would not in all likelihood have possessed the elegant classical Latin that Poggio had painstakingly mastered but rather, to judge from the many vigorous contemporary literary works that survive, a vital, fluent, highly flexible Latin that could swoop effortlessly from the subtlest of scholastic distinctions to the earthiest of obscenities. If Poggio sensed that he could impress his hosts with moral seriousness, he could have discoursed eloquently about the miseries of the human condition; if he thought he could win them over by making them laugh, he could have launched into one of his tales of foolish rustics, compliant housewives, and sexually rapacious priests.

  Poggio possessed one further gift that set him apart from virtually all the other book-hunting humanists. He was a superbly well-trained scribe, with exceptionally fine handwriting, great powers of concentration, and a high degree of accuracy. It is difficult for us, at this distance, to take in the significance of such qualities: our technologies for producing transcriptions, facsimiles, and copies have almost entirely erased what was once an important personal achievement. That importance began to decline, though not at all precipitously, even in Poggio’s own lifetime, for by the 1430s a German entrepreneur, Johann Gutenberg, began experimenting with a new invention, movable type, which would revolutionize the reproduction and transmission of texts. By the century’s end printers, especially the great Aldus in Venice, would print Latin texts in a typeface whose clarity and elegance remain unrivalled after five centuries. That typeface was based on the beautiful handwriting13 of Poggio and his humanist friends. What Poggio did by hand to produce a single copy would soon be done mechanically to produce hundreds.

  But this achievement lay in the future, and, in any case, the printers who set the books in type still depended on accurate, readable, handwritten transcriptions, often of manuscripts that were illegible to all but a few. Poggio’s talent as a transcriber struck contemporaries as uncanny, all the more so because he worked so rapidly. What this meant was that he could not only inveigle his way into the monastery and nose out the precious manuscripts of lost works, but also that he could borrow them, copy them quickly, and send the results back to humanists waiting eagerly at home in Italy. If borrowing proved impossible—that is, if the librarian refused to lend a particular manuscript—Poggio could copy it on the spot, or, if necessary, could entrust the task to a scribe whom he had personally trained up to at least a minimal level of competence.

  In 1417, then, Poggio the book hunter had a near-perfect conjunction of time, skills, and desire. All that he lacked was ready money. Traveling, even frugally, was expensive. There were costs for renting a horse; fees for crossing rivers or riding on toll roads; charges, little more than extortion, by surly customs officials and agents of petty lordlings; gratuities to guides through difficult passes; and, of course, bills for food and lodging and stabling at inns. He also needed money to pay an assistant scribe, and to provide, if necessary, the incentive to induce a reluctant monastery to lend its treasure.

  Even if he had banked some funds from his years in the papal bureaucracy, Poggio is very unlikely to have been able to pay these costs on his own. In such circumstances, the inveterate letter writer would have had recourse to his pen. It is probable that he wrote to wealthy friends at home who shared his passion and explained to them that circumstances had suddenly given him the opportunity about which they had only dreamed. In good health, untrammeled by work or family, obliged to no one, at liberty to come and go as he chose, he was prepared to embark on a serious search for the lost treasures that meant most to them—the heritage of the ancient world.

  Such support, whether it came from a single rich patron or from a group of fellow humanists, helps to account for the fact that in January 1417, Poggio was heading toward the destination where he would make his discovery. The support must have been considerable, for this was not his only book-hunting expedition that winter. It followed directly on another trip, to the venerable monastery of St. Gall, not far from the city of Constance, and that trip was itself a return visit. The preceding year at St. Gall, in the company of two Italian friends, Poggio had made a series of important finds. Thinking that they might have overlooked other treasures, he and one of the friends went back.

  Poggio and his companion, Bartolomeo de Aragazzi, had much in common. Both hailed from Tuscany, Poggio from the modest town of Terranuova near Arezzo, Bartolomeo from the beautiful hilltop city of Montepulciano. Both had gone to Rome and had acquired positions as scriptors in the papal curia. Both had come to Constance to serve as apostolic secretaries14 in the disastrous pontificat
e of John XXIII and, consequently, both found themselves, in the wake of the pope’s downfall, with time on their hands. And both were ardent humanists, eager to use their skills in reading and copying to recover the lost texts of antiquity.

  They were close friends, working and traveling together and sharing the same ambition, but they were also rivals, competitors in the pursuit of the fame that came with discovery. “I hate all boastful conversation,15 all flattery, all exaggeration,” Bartolomeo wrote to an important patron in Italy; “May I be kept from taking pride in dreams of self-exaltation or vainglory.” The letter, dated January 19, 1417, was written from St. Gall, and it goes on to mention a few of the notable discoveries he had made in what he calls the “prison” in which they were penned. He could not, he added, hope to describe all the volumes he had found, “for a day would hardly be sufficient to list them all.” Tellingly, he does not so much as mention the name of his traveling companion, Poggio Bracciolini.

  The problem was that Bartolomeo’s finds were simply not very thrilling. He had dredged up a copy of a book by Flavius Vegetius Renatus on the ancient Roman army—a book, he wrote implausibly, that will “do us good, if we ever use him sometimes in camp or more gloriously on a crusade”—and a small dictionary or word list by Pompeius Festus. Not only were both books exceedingly minor but also, as Bartolomeo himself must have known, both were already available in Italy, so in fact neither was actually a discovery.

  In late January, having failed to lay hands on the great treasures they had hoped to uncover and perhaps feeling the burden of their competitiveness, the friends went their separate ways. Poggio evidently headed north, probably accompanied by a German scribe whom he was training. Bartolomeo seems to have gone off by himself. “I shall set out16 for another monastery of the Hermits deep in the Alps,” he wrote to his Italian correspondent. He planned then to go on to still more remote monasteries. The places were extremely difficult to reach, especially in winter—“the way is rough and broken, for there is no approach to them except through the precipices of the Alps and through rivers and forests”—but he reminded himself that “the path of virtue is very full of toil and peril.” In these monastic libraries, rumors had it, a vast trove of ancient books was buried. “I shall try to urge this poor little body to undertake the effort of rescuing them and not to flinch at the difficulties of their location, at the discomforts and at the increasing cold of the Alps.”

  It is easy enough to smile at such claims of hardship—trained as a lawyer, Bartolomeo was certainly calculating a rhetorical effect—but in fact he fell ill shortly after he left St. Gall and was forced to return to Constance, where it took him months to recuperate. Poggio, on the road north, would not have known that, since Bartolomeo had dropped out of the hunt, he was now searching alone.

  Poggio did not like monks. He knew several impressive ones, men of great moral seriousness and learning. But on the whole he found them superstitious, ignorant, and hopelessly lazy. Monasteries, he thought, were the dumping grounds for those deemed unfit for life in the world. Noblemen fobbed off the sons they judged to be weaklings, misfits, or good-for-nothings; merchants sent their dim-witted or paralytic children there; peasants got rid of extra mouths they could not feed. The hardiest of the inmates could at least do some productive labor in the monastery gardens and the adjacent fields, as monks in earlier, most austere times had done, but for the most part, Poggio thought, they were a pack of idlers. Behind the thick walls of the cloisters, the parasites would mumble their prayers and live off the income generated by those who farmed the monastery’s extensive landholdings. The Church was a landlord, wealthier than the greatest nobles in the realm, and it possessed the worldly power to enforce its rents and all its other rights and privileges. When the newly elected bishop of Hildesheim, in the north of Germany, asked to see the diocesan library, he was brought to the armory17 and shown the pikes and battleaxes hanging on the walls; these, he was informed, were the books with which the rights of the bishopric had been won and must be defended. The inhabitants of wealthy monasteries might not have to call upon these weapons very frequently, but, as they sat in the dim light and contemplated their revenues, they knew—and their tenants knew—that brute force was available.

  With his friends in the curia Poggio shared jokes about the venality, stupidity, and sexual appetite of monks. And their claims to piety left him unimpressed: “I cannot find that they do anything18 but sing like grasshoppers,” he wrote, “and I cannot help thinking they are too liberally paid for the mere exercise of their lungs.” Even the hard work of monastic spiritual discipline seemed paltry to him, when set against the real hard work he observed in the fields: “They extol their labors as a kind of Herculean task, because they rise in the night to chant the praises of God. This is no doubt an extraordinary proof of merit, that they sit up to exercise themselves in psalmody. What would they say if they rose to go to the plough, like farmers, exposed to the wind and rain, with bare feet, and with their bodies thinly clad?” Their whole enterprise seemed to him an exercise in hypocrisy.

  But, of course, as he approached his targeted monastery, Poggio would have buried these views in his breast. He may have despised monastic life, but he understood it well. He knew precisely where in the monastery he needed to go and what ingratiating words he had to speak to gain access to the things he most wanted to see. Above all, he knew exactly how the things he sought had been produced. Though he ridiculed what he regarded as monastic sloth, he knew that whatever he hoped to find existed only because of centuries of institutional commitment and long, painstaking human labor.

  The Benedictine Rule had called for manual labor, as well as prayer and reading, and it was always assumed that this labor could include writing. The early founders of monastic orders did not regard copying manuscripts as an exalted activity; on the contrary, as they were highly aware, most of the copying in the ancient world had been done by educated slaves. The task was therefore inherently humiliating as well as tedious, a perfect combination for the ascetic project of disciplining the spirit. Poggio had no sympathy with such spiritual discipline; competitive and ambitious, his spirit longed to shine in the light of the world, not to shrink from its gaze. For him copying manuscripts, which he did with unrivalled skill, was not an ascetic but rather an aesthetic undertaking, one by which he advanced his own personal reputation. But by virtue of that skill he was able to see at a glance—with either admiration or scorn—exactly what effort and ability had gone into the manuscript that lay before him.

  Not every monk was equally adept at copying, just as not every monk was equally adept at the hard farm labor on which the survival of the early communities depended. The early regulations already envisaged a division of labor, as in the Rule of St. Ferreol (530–581), a French Benedictine: “He who does not turn up the earth with the plough ought to write the parchment with his fingers.” (The reverse, of course, was also true: he who could not write parchment with his fingers was assigned to the plough.) Those who wrote unusually well—in fine, clear handwriting that the other monks could easily read and with painstaking accuracy in the transcription—came to be valued. In the “wergild” codes that in Germanic lands and in Ireland specified the payment of reparations for murder—200 shillings for killing a churl, 300 for a low-ranking cleric, 400 if the cleric was saying mass when he was attacked, and so forth—the loss of a scribe by violence was ranked equal to the loss of a bishop or an abbot.

  The high price, at a time when life was cheap, suggests both how important and how difficult it was for monasteries to obtain the books that they needed in order to enforce the reading rule. Even the most celebrated monastic libraries of the Middle Ages were tiny in comparison with the libraries of antiquity or those that existed in Baghdad or Cairo. To assemble a modest number of books, in the long centuries before the invention of the printing press forever changed the equation, meant the eventual establishment of what were called scriptoria, workshops where monks would be trained to
sit for long hours making copies. At first the copying was probably done in an improvised setting in the cloister, where, even if the cold sometimes stiffened the fingers, at least the light would be good. But in time special rooms were designated or built for the purpose. In the greatest monasteries, increasingly eager to amass prestigious collections of books, these were large rooms equipped with clear glass windows under which the monks, as many as thirty of them, sat at individual desks, sometimes partitioned off from one another.

  In charge of the scriptorium was the person on whom Poggio and the other book hunters would have focused their most seductive blandishments: the monastery’s librarian. This important figure would have been accustomed to extravagant courtship, for he was responsible for providing all of the equipment that was required for the copying of the manuscripts: pens, ink, and penknives whose precise merits or defects would become overwhelmingly obvious to the laboring scribe after a few hours at the day’s task. The librarian could, if he wished, make a scribe’s life miserable or, alternatively, provide a favorite with particularly fine tools. Those tools also included rulers, awls (to make tiny holes for ruling the lines evenly), fine-pointed metal pens for drawing the lines, reading frames to hold the book to be copied, weights to keep the pages from turning. For manuscripts that were to be illuminated, there were still other specialized tools and materials.

  Most books in the ancient world took the form of scrolls—like the Torah scrolls that Jews use in their services to this day—but by the fourth century Christians had almost completely opted for a different format, the codex, from which our familiar books derive. The codex has the huge advantage of being far easier for readers to find their way about in: the text can be conveniently paginated and indexed, and the pages can be turned quickly to the desired place. Not until the invention of the computer, with its superior search functions, could a serious challenge be mounted to the codex’s magnificently simple and flexible format. Only now have we begun once again to speak of “scrolling” through a text.