CHAPTER TWO

THE MOMENT OF DISCOVERY

ITALIANS HAD BEEN book-hunting for the better part of a century, ever since the poet and scholar Petrarch brought glory¹ on himself in the 1330s by piecing together Livy’s monumental History of Rome and finding forgotten masterpieces by Cicero, Propertius, and others. Petrarch’s achievement had inspired others to seek out lost classics that had been lying unread, often for centuries. The recovered texts were copied, edited, commented upon, and eagerly exchanged, conferring distinction on those who had found them and forming the basis for what became known as the “study of the humanities.”

The “humanists,” as those who were devoted to this study were called, knew from carefully poring over the texts that had survived from classical Rome that many once famous books or parts of books were still missing. Occasionally, the ancient authors whom Poggio and his fellow humanists eagerly read gave tantalizing quotations from these books, often accompanying extravagant praise or vituperative attacks. Alongside discussions of Virgil and Ovid, for example, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian remarked that “Macer and Lucretius are certainly² worth reading,” and went on to discuss Varro of Atax, Cornelius Severus, Saleius Bassus, Gaius Rabirius, Albinovanus Pedo, Marcus Furius Bibaculus, Lucius Accius, Marcus Pacuvius, and others whose works he greatly admired. The humanists knew that some of these missing works were likely to have been lost forever—as it turned out, with the exception of Lucretius, all of the authors just mentioned have been lost—but they suspected that others, perhaps many others, were hidden away in dark places, not only in Italy but across the Alps. After all, Petrarch had found the manuscript of Cicero’s Pro Archia in Liège, in Belgium, and the Propertius manuscript in Paris.

The prime hunting grounds for Poggio and his fellow book hunters were the libraries of old monasteries, and for good reason: for long centuries monasteries had been virtually the only institutions that cared about books. Even in the stable and prosperous times of the Roman Empire, literacy rates, by our standards³ at least, were not high. As the empire crumbled, as cities decayed, trade declined, and the increasingly anxious populace scanned the horizon for barbarian armies, the whole Roman system of elementary and higher education fell apart. What began as downsizing went on to wholesale abandonment. Schools closed, libraries and academies shut their doors, professional grammarians and teachers of rhetoric found themselves out of work. There were more important things to worry about than the fate of books.

But all monks were expected to know how to read. In a world increasingly dominated by illiterate warlords, that expectation, formulated early in the history of monasticism, was of incalculable importance. Here is the Rule from the monasteries established in Egypt and throughout the Middle East by the late fourth-century Coptic saint Pachomius. When a candidate for admission to the monastery presents himself to the elders,

they shall give him twenty⁴ Psalms or two of the Apostles’ epistles or some other part of Scripture. And if he is illiterate he shall go at the first, third and sixth hours to someone who can teach and has been appointed for him. He shall stand before him and learn very studiously and with all gratitude. The fundamentals of a syllable, the verbs and nouns shall be written for him and even if he does not want to, he shall be compelled to read. (Rule 139)

“He shall be compelled to read.” It was this compulsion that, through centuries of chaos, helped to salvage the achievements of ancient thought.

Though in the most influential of all the monastic rules, written in the sixth century, St. Benedict did not similarly specify an explicit literacy requirement, he provided the equivalent of one by including a period each day for reading—“prayerful reading,” as he put it—as well as manual labor. “Idleness is the enemy of the soul,” the saint wrote, and he made certain that the hours would be filled up. Monks would be permitted to read at certain other times as well, though such voluntary reading would have to be conducted in strict silence. (In Benedict’s time, as throughout antiquity, reading was ordinarily performed audibly.) But about the prescribed reading times there was nothing voluntary.

The monks were to read, whether they felt like it or not, and the Rule called for careful supervision:

Above all, one or two seniors⁵ must surely be deputed to make the rounds of the monastery while the brothers are reading. Their duty is to see that no brother is so acediosus as to waste time or engage in idle talk to the neglect of his reading, and so not only harm himself but also distract others. (49:17–18)

Acediosus, sometimes translated as “apathetic,” refers to an illness, specific to monastic communities, which had already been brilliantly diagnosed in the late fourth century by the Desert Father John Cassian. The monk in the grip of acedia would find it difficult or impossible to read. Looking away from his book, he might try to distract himself with gossip but would more likely glance in disgust at his surroundings and at his fellow monks. He would feel that things were better somewhere else, that he was wasting his life, that everything was stale and pointless, that he was suffocating.

He looks about anxiously⁶ this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness.

Such a monk—and there were evidently many of them—had succumbed to what we would call a clinical state of depression.

Cassian called the disease “the noonday demon,” and the Benedictine Rule set a careful watch, especially at reading times, to detect anyone manifesting its symptoms.

If such a monk⁷ is found—God forbid—he should be reproved a first and a second time. If he does not amend, he must be subjected to the punishment of the rule so that the others may have fear.

A refusal to read at the prescribed time—whether because of distraction, boredom, or despair—would thus be visited first by public criticism and then, if the refusal continued, by blows. The symptoms of psychic pain would be driven out by physical pain. And, suitably chastened, the distressed monk would return—in principle at least—to his “prayerful reading.”

There was yet another time in which the Benedictine Rule called for reading: every day at meals one of the brothers was assigned, on a weekly basis, to read aloud. Benedict was well aware that for at least certain of the monks this assignment would occasion pride, and he therefore tried to suppress the sensation as best he could: “Let the incoming reader ask all to pray for him so that God may shield him from the feeling of elation.”⁸ He was aware too that for others the readings would be an occasion for mockery or simply for chat, and here too the Rule made careful provision: “Let there be⁹ complete silence. No whispering, no speaking—only the reader’s voice should be heard there.” But, above all, he wanted to prevent these readings from provoking discussion or debate: “No one should presume¹⁰ to ask a question about the reading or about anything else, lest occasion be given.”

“Lest occasion be given”: the phrase, in a text normally quite clear, is oddly vague. Occasion to whom or for what? Modern editors sometimes insert the phrase “to the devil” and that indeed may be what is implied here. But why should the Prince of Darkness be excited by a question about the reading? The answer must be that any question, however innocuous, could raise the prospect of a discussion, a discussion that would imply that religious doctrines were open to inquiry and argument.

Benedict did not absolutely prohibit commentary on the sacred texts that were read aloud, but he wanted to restrict its source: “The superior,”¹¹ the Rule allows, “may wish to say a few words of instruction.” Those words were not to be questioned or contradicted, and indeed all contention was in principle to be suppressed. As the listing of punishments in the influential rule of the Irish monk Columbanus (born in the year Benedict died) makes clear, lively debate, intellectual or otherwise, was forbidden. To the monk who has dared to contradict a fellow monk with such words as “It is not as you say,” there is a heavy penalty: “an imposition of silence or fifty blows.” The high walls that hedged about the mental life of the monks—the imposition of silence, the prohibition of questioning, the punishing of debate with slaps or blows of the whip—were all meant to affirm unambiguously that these pious communities were the opposite of the philosophical academies of Greece or Rome, places that had thrived upon the spirit of contradiction and cultivated a restless, wide-ranging curiosity.

All the same, monastic rules did require reading, and that was enough to set in motion an extraordinary chain of consequences. Reading was not optional or desirable or recommended; in a community that took its obligations with deadly seriousness, reading was obligatory. And reading required books. Books that were opened again and again eventually fell apart, however carefully they were handled. Therefore, almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks repeatedly purchase or acquire books. In the course of the vicious Gothic Wars of the mid-sixth century and their still more miserable aftermath, the last commercial workshops of book production folded, and the vestiges of the book market fell apart. Therefore, again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks carefully preserve and copy those books that they already possessed. But all trade with the papyrus makers of Egypt had long vanished, and in the absence of a commercial book market, the commercial industry for converting animal skins to writing surfaces had fallen into abeyance. Therefore, once again almost inadvertently, monastic rules necessitated that monks learn the laborious art of making parchment and salvaging existing parchment. Without wishing to emulate the pagan elites by placing books or writing at the center of society, without affirming the importance of rhetoric or grammar, without prizing either learning or debate, monks nonetheless became the principal readers, librarians, book preservers, and book producers of the Western world.

Poggio and the other humanists on the trail of lost classics knew all this. Having already sifted through many of the monastic libraries in Italy and having followed Petrarch’s lead in France, they also knew that the great, uncharted territories were Switzerland and Germany. But many of those monasteries were extremely difficult to reach—their founders had built them in deliberately remote places, in order to withdraw from the temptations, distractions, and dangers of the world. And once an eager humanist, having endured the discomforts and risks of travel, managed to reach the distant monasteries, what then? The number of scholars who knew what to look for and who were competent to recognize what they had come to find, if they had the good fortune to stumble across it, was extremely small. There was, moreover, a problem of access: to get through the door a scholar would have to be able to persuade a skeptical abbot and a still more skeptical monastic librarian that he had a legitimate reason to be there. Access to the library was ordinarily denied to any outsider. Petrarch was a cleric; he could at least make his appeal from within the large institutional community of the Church. Many of the humanists by contrast were laymen and would have aroused immediate suspicion.

This daunting list did not exhaust the problems. For if a book hunter reached a monastery, got past the heavily barred door, entered the library, and actually found something interesting, he would still need to do something with the manuscript he had found.

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 pontificate 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.

Since papyrus was no longer available and paper did not come into general use until the fourteenth century, for more than a thousand years the chief writing material used for books was made from the skins of animals—cows, sheep, goats, and occasionally deer. These surfaces needed to be made smooth, and hence another tool that the monastic librarian distributed was pumice stone, to rub away the remaining animal hair along with any bumps or imperfections. The scribe to whom a poor-quality parchment had been given was in for a very disagreeable task, and in the margins of surviving monastic manuscripts there are occasional outbursts of distress: “The parchment is hairy”¹⁹ … “Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text” … “Thank God, it will soon be dark.” “Let the copyist be permitted to put an end to his labor,” a weary monk wrote beneath his name, the date, and the place where he worked; “Now I’ve written²⁰ the whole thing,” wrote another. “For Christ’s sake give me a drink.”

The finest parchment, the one that made life easier for scribes and must have figured in their sweetest dreams, was made of calfskin and called vellum. And the best of the lot was uterine vellum, from the skins of aborted calves. Brilliantly white, smooth, and durable, these skins were reserved for the most precious books, ones graced with elaborate, gemlike miniatures and occasionally encased in covers encrusted with actual gems. The libraries of the world still preserve a reasonable number of these remarkable objects, the achievement of scribes who lived seven or eight hundred years ago and labored for untold hours to create something beautiful.

Good scribes were exempted from certain times of collective prayer, in order to maximize the hours of daylight in the scriptorium. And they did not have to work at night: because of an entirely justifiable fear of fire, all candlelight was forbidden. But for the time—about six hours a day—that they actually spent at their desks, their lives belonged entirely to their books. It was possible, in certain monasteries at least, to hope that monks would understand what they were copying: “Vouchsafe, O Lord,²¹ to bless this workroom of Thy servants,” declared the dedication of one scriptorium, “that all which they write therein may be comprehended by their intelligence and realized in their works.” But the actual interest of the scribes in the books they copied (or their distaste for those books) was strictly irrelevant. Indeed, insofar as the copying was a form of discipline—an exercise in humility and a willing embrace of pain—distaste or simple incomprehension might be preferable to engagement. Curiosity was to be avoided at all costs.

The complete subordination of the monastic scribe to the text—the erasure, in the interest of crushing the monk’s spirit, of his intellect and sensibility—could not have been further from Poggio’s own avid curiosity and egotism. But he understood that his passionate hope of recovering reasonably accurate traces of the ancient past depended heavily on this subordination. An engaged reader, Poggio knew, was prone to alter his text in order to get it to make sense, but such alterations, over centuries, inevitably led to wholesale corruptions. It was better that monastic scribes had been forced to copy everything exactly at it appeared before their eyes, even those things that made no sense at all.

A sheet with a cutout window generally covered the page of the manuscript being copied, so that the monk had to focus on one line at a time. And monks were strictly forbidden to change what they thought were mistakes in the texts they were copying. They could correct only their own slips of the pen by carefully scraping off the ink with a razor and repairing the spot with a mixture of milk, cheese, and lime, the medieval version of our own product for whiting out mistakes. There was no crumpling up the page and starting afresh. Though the skins of sheep and goats were plentiful, the process of producing parchment from them was laborious. Good parchment was far too valuable and scarce to be discarded. This value helps to account for the fact that monasteries collected ancient manuscripts in the first place and did not consign them to the rubbish.

To be sure, there were a certain number of abbots and of monastic librarians who treasured not only the parchment but also the pagan works written on them. Steeped in classical literature, some believed that they could rifle its treasures without contamination, the way the ancient Hebrews had been permitted by God to steal the riches of the Egyptians. But over the generations, as a substantial Christian literature was created, it became less easy to make such an argument. Fewer and fewer monks were inclined, in any case, to make it. Between the sixth century and the middle of the eighth century, Greek and Latin classics virtually ceased to be copied at all. What had begun as an active campaign to forget—a pious attack on pagan ideas—had evolved into actual forgetting. The ancient poems, philosophical treatises, and political speeches, at one time so threatening and so alluring, were no longer in anyone’s mind, let alone on anyone’s lips. They had been reduced to the condition of mute things, sheets of parchment, stitched together, covered with unread words.

Only the remarkable durability of the parchment used in these codices kept the ideas of the ancients alive at all, and, as the humanist book hunters knew, even strong material was no guarantee of survival. Working with knives,²² brushes, and rags, monks often carefully washed away the old writings—Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Lucretius—and wrote in their place the texts that they were instructed by their superiors to copy. The task must have been a tiresome one, and, for the very rare scribe who actually cared about the work he was erasing, an excruciating one.

If the original ink proved tenacious, it could still be possible to make out the traces of the texts that were written over: a unique fourth-century copy of Cicero’s On the Republic remained visible beneath a seventh-century copy of St. Augustine’s meditation on the Psalms; the sole surviving copy of Seneca’s book on friendship was deciphered beneath an Old Testament inscribed in the late sixth century. These strange, layered manuscripts—called palimpsests; from the Greek for “scraped again”—have served as the source of several major works from the ancient past that would not otherwise be known. But no medieval monk would have been encouraged to read, as it were, between the lines.

The monastery was a place of rules, but in the scriptorium there were rules within rules. Access was denied to all non-scribes. Absolute silence reigned. Scribes were not allowed to choose the particular books that they copied or to break the dead silence by requesting aloud from the librarian such books as they might wish to consult in order to complete the task that had been assigned them. An elaborate gestural language was invented in order to facilitate such requests as were permitted. If a scribe wanted to consult a psalter, he made the general sign for a book—extending his hands and turning over imaginary pages—and then, by putting his hands on his head in the shape of a crown, the specific sign for the psalms of King David. If he was asking for a pagan book, he began, after making the general sign, to scratch behind his ear, like a dog scratching his fleas. And if he wished to have what the Church regarded as a particularly offensive or dangerous pagan book, he could put two fingers into his mouth, as if he were gagging.

Poggio was a layman, part of a very different world. His precise destination in 1417, after he parted ways with Bartolomeo, is not known—perhaps like a prospector hiding the location of his mine, he deliberately withheld its name from his letters. There were dozens of monasteries to which he might have gone in the hope of turning up something remarkable, but many scholars have long thought that the likeliest candidate is the Benedictine Abbey of Fulda.²³ That abbey, in a strategic area of central Germany, between the Rhône and the Vogelsberg Mountains, had the features that most excited the interest of a book hunter: it was ancient, it was rich, it had once possessed a great tradition of learning, and it was now in decline.

If it was Fulda that he approached, Poggio could not afford to seem overbearing. Founded in the eighth century by a disciple of the Apostle of Germany, St. Boniface, the abbey was unusually independent. Its abbot was a prince of the Holy Roman Empire: when he walked in procession, an armor-clad knight carried the imperial banner before him, and he had the privilege of sitting at the left hand of the emperor himself. Many of the monks were German nobles—men who would have had a very clear sense of the respect that was due to them. If the monastery had lost some of the prestige it once enjoyed and had been forced in the not too distant past to part with some of its immense territories, it nonetheless was a force to reckon with. With his modest birth and very limited means, Poggio, the former apostolic secretary of a disgraced and deposed pope, had few cards to play.

Rehearsing in his mind his little speech of introduction, Poggio would have dismounted and walked up the tree-lined avenue toward the abbey’s single, heavy gate. From the outside Fulda resembled a fortress; indeed, in the preceding century, in a bitter dispute with the burghers of the adjacent city, it had been violently attacked. Inside, like most monasteries, it was strikingly self-sufficient. By January the extensive vegetable, flower, and botanical gardens were in their winter sleep, but the monks would have carefully harvested what they could store for the long, dark months, taking special care to gather the medicinal herbs that would be used in the infirmary and the communal bath. The granaries at this point in the winter would have still been reasonably full, and there would have been ample straw and oats for the horses and donkeys in the stables. Looking around, Poggio would have taken in the chicken coops, the covered yard for sheep, the cowshed with its smell of manure and fresh milk, and the large pigsties. He might have felt a pang for the olives and the wine of Tuscany, but he knew that he would not go hungry. Past the mills and the oil press, past the great basilica and its adjacent cloister, past the houses for the novices, the dormitory, the servants’ quarters, and the pilgrims’ hospice where he and his assistant would be lodged, Poggio would have been led to the abbot’s house to meet the ruler of this little kingdom.

In 1417, if Fulda was indeed Poggio’s destination, that ruler was Johann von Merlau. After greeting him humbly, explaining something about himself, and presenting a letter of recommendation from a well-known cardinal, Poggio would almost certainly have begun by expressing his interest in glimpsing the precious relics of St. Boniface and saying a prayer in their holy presence. His life, after all, was full of such observances: bureaucrats in the papal court routinely began and ended their days with prayers. And if nothing in his letters suggests a particular interest in relics or the intervention of saints or the rituals employed to reduce the soul’s painful time in Purgatory, Poggio nonetheless would have known upon what possessions Fulda most prided itself.

The visitor would then as a special favor have been led into the basilica. If he had not already taken it in, Poggio would certainly have realized, as he entered the transept and walked down the stairs into the dark, vaulted crypt, that Fulda’s pilgrimage church seemed strangely familiar: it was directly modeled after Rome’s fourth-century Basilica of St. Peter’s. (The vast St. Peter’s in Rome today was built long after Poggio’s death.) There by candlelight, enshrined in a rich setting of gold, crystal, and jewels, he would have seen the bones of the saint, massacred in 754 by the Frisians he was struggling to convert.

When he and his hosts emerged once again into the light and when he deemed that he had reached the appropriate moment, Poggio would have nudged the conversation toward his actual purpose in coming. He could have done so by initiating a discussion of one of Fulda’s most celebrated figures, Rabanus Maurus, who had served as abbot for two decades, from 822 to 842. Rabanus Maurus was a prolific author of biblical commentaries, doctrinal treatises, pedagogical guides, scholarly compendia, and a series of fantastically beautiful poems in cipher. Most of these works Poggio could easily have seen in the Vatican Library, along with the vast tome for which Rabanus was best known: a work of stupefying erudition and dullness that attempted to bring together in its twenty-two books all of human knowledge. Its title was De rerum naturis—“On the Natures of Things”—but contemporaries, acknowledging the scope of its ambition, called it “On the Universe.”

The works of the ninth-century monk epitomized the heavy, plodding style that Poggio and his fellow humanists despised. But he also recognized that Rabanus Maurus was an immensely learned man, steeped in pagan as well as Christian literature, and that he had transformed Fulda’s monastic school into the most important in Germany. As all schools do, the one at Fulda needed books, and Rabanus had met the need by greatly enriching the monastic library. Rabanus, who as a young man²⁴ had studied with Alcuin, the greatest scholar of the age of Charlemagne, knew where to get his hands on important manuscripts. He had them brought to Fulda, where he trained a large cohort of scribes to copy them. And so he had built what was for the time a stupendous collection.

That time, some six hundred years before Poggio, was from the book hunter’s perspective highly propitious. It was far enough into the past to hold out the possibility of a link to a more distant past. And the gradual decline over the centuries in the monastery’s intellectual seriousness only intensified the excitement. Who knew what was sitting on those shelves, untouched perhaps for centuries? Tattered manuscripts that had chanced to survive the long nightmare of chaos and destruction, in the wake of the fall of the Roman Empire, might well have found their way to remote Fulda. Rabanus’s monks could have made the scratching or gagging sign for pagan books to copy, and those copies, having fallen into oblivion, would be awaiting the humanist’s revivifying touch.

Such, in any case, was Poggio’s ardent hope, in Fulda or wherever he found himself, and his pulse must have quickened when at last he would have been led by the monastery’s chief librarian into a large vaulted room and shown a volume attached by a chain to the librarian’s own desk. The volume was a catalogue, and as he pored over its pages, Poggio pointed—for the rule of silence in the library was strictly observed—to the books he wanted to see.

Genuine interest, as well as a sense of discretion, might have dictated that Poggio request first to see unfamiliar works by one of the greatest Church Fathers, Tertullian. Then, as the manuscripts were brought to his desk, he plunged, with what must have been increasing excitement, into a series of ancient Roman authors whose works were utterly unknown to him and to any of his fellow humanists. Though Poggio did not reveal precisely where he went, he did reveal—indeed, he trumpeted—what he had found. For what all book hunters dreamed of was actually happening.

He opened an epic poem in some 14,000 lines on the wars between Rome and Carthage. Poggio might have recognized the name of the author, Silius Italicus, though until this moment none of his works had surfaced. A canny politician and a wily, unscrupulous orator, who served as a tool in a succession of show trials, Silius had managed to survive the murderous reigns of Caligula, Nero, and Domitian. In retirement, the younger Pliny had written with urbane irony, he “obliterated by the praiseworthy use²⁵ he made of leisure the stain he had incurred through his active exertions in former days.” Now Poggio and his friends would be able to savor one of the fruits of this leisure.

He opened another long poem, this one by an author, Manilius, whose name the book hunter would certainly not have recognized, for it is not mentioned by any surviving ancient author. Poggio saw at once that it was a learned work on astronomy, and he would have been able to tell from the style and from the poet’s own allusions that it had been written at the very beginning of the empire, during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius.

More ghosts surged up from the Roman past. An ancient literary critic who had flourished during Nero’s reign and had written notes and glosses on classical authors; another critic who quoted extensively from lost epics written in imitation of Homer; a grammarian who wrote a treatise on spelling that Poggio knew his Latin-obsessed friends in Florence would find thrilling. Yet another manuscript was a discovery whose thrill might have been tinged for him with melancholy: a large fragment of a hitherto unknown history of the Roman Empire written by a high-ranking officer in the imperial army, Ammianus Marcellinus. The melancholy would have arisen not only from the fact that the first thirteen of the original thirty-one books were missing from the manuscript Poggio copied by hand—and these lost books have never been found—but also from the fact that the work was written on the eve of the empire’s collapse. A clearheaded, thoughtful, and unusually impartial historian, Ammianus seems to have sensed the impending end. His description of a world exhausted by crushing taxes, the financial ruin of large segments of the population, and the dangerous decline in the army’s morale vividly conjured up the conditions that made it possible, some twenty years after his death, for the Goths to sack Rome.

Even the smallest of the finds that Poggio was making was highly significant—for anything at all to surface after so long seemed miraculous—but they were all eclipsed, from our own perspective if not immediately, by the discovery of a work still more ancient than any of the others that he had found. One of the manuscripts consisted of a long text written around 50 BCE by a poet and philosopher named Titus Lucretius Carus. The text’s title, De rerum natura—On the Nature of Things—was strikingly similar to the title of Rabanus Maurus’s celebrated encyclopedia, De rerum naturis. But where the monk’s work was dull and conventional, Lucretius’ work was dangerously radical.

Poggio would almost certainly have recognized the name Lucretius from Ovid, Cicero, and other ancient sources he had painstakingly pored over, in the company of his humanist friends, but neither he nor anyone in his circle²⁶ had encountered more than a scrap or two of his actual writing, which had, as far as anyone knew, been lost forever.

Poggio may not have had time, in the gathering darkness of the monastic library, and under the wary eyes of the abbot or his librarian, to do more than read the opening lines. But he would have seen immediately that Lucretius’ Latin verses were astonishingly beautiful. Ordering his scribe to make a copy, he hurried to liberate it from the monastery. What is not clear is whether he had any intimation at all that he was releasing a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world.