The limits of our little
book forbid our speaking of other examples of this splendid style, but
we cannot conclude without noticing that in the opinion of M. Ferdinand
Denis, the Golden Gospels of St. M?dard of Soissons is the most
beautiful Carolingian MSS. extant.
CHAPTER XII
MONASTIC ILLUMINATION
Introductory--Monasteries and their work from the sixth to the ninth
century--The claustral schools--Alcuin--Warnefrid and Theodulf--Clerics
and monastics--The Golden Age of monasticism--The Order of St.
Benedict--Cistercian houses--Other Orders--Progress of writing in
Carolingian times--Division of labour.
In the sixth century the monasteries, such as they were, necessarily
kept themselves very quiet and unobtrusive. They were situated usually
in out-of-the-way corners, solitudes apart from civilisation, or, at
least, apart from the busy haunts of men. In the eighth century there is
a marked difference. The Capitular of Aix-la-Chapelle, of 789, required
that minor schools should be attached _to all monasteries and cathedral
churches_ without exception, and that children of all ranks, _both noble
and servile_, should be received into them. Also that the larger
monasteries should open major schools in which the seven sciences of
mathematics, astronomy, arithmetic, music, rhetoric, dialectics, and
geography, were to be taught--and this in two ways.
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