Arts libéraux et philosophie au moyen âge. Actes du Quatrième Congrès International de
Philosophie Médiévale. Montreal: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1969.
Bursill-Hal, Geoffrey. Speculative Grammars of the Middle Ages: The Doctrine of partes orationis
of the Modistae. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.
Evans, Michael. “Allegorical Women and Practical Men: The Iconography of the Artes
Reconsidered.” In Medieval Women, ed. Derek Baker. Oxford: Blackwell, 1978.
Hughes, Andrew. Medieval Music: The Sixth Liberal Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1974.
Katzenellenbogen, Adolf. The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral. Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1959.
——. Allegories of the Virtues and Vices in Medieval Art. London: Warburg Institute, 1939.
Murphy, James Gerald. Medieval Rhetoric: A Select Bibliography. Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1971.
——. Medieval Rhetoric. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
——, ed. Medieval Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Medieval Rhetoric. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1978.
Wagner, David L., ed. The Seven Liberal Arts in the Middle Ages. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1983.
LIBRARIES
. The history of libraries in the early Middle Ages is bound up with the decline of the
urban schools and educated civic elite characteristic of Roman culture and the emergence
of the monastic community and the household of the bishop as centers of intellectual
activity in Christian culture. The conversion of intellectuals like Jerome, Augustine,
Paulinus of Nola (from Bordeaux), and Sulpicius Severus, the biographer of Martin of
Tours, to a monastic or clerical life in the 4th and 5th centuries, together with their use of
classical literary culture, shorn of reference to Greek and Roman religion, ensured the
continuation of a learned book culture. The fact that Christianity was a religion based on
a text, with the consequent need to interpret that text, contributed as well to an emphasis
on a literate, book culture for the clerical and monastic elite.
The development of libraries required material resources (a supply of prepared animal
skins for parchment; ink, pens, and other writing tools; binding supplies), skilled scribes
and artisans to use these resources, the ability to bring these resources and skills together
at one place, and the opportunity to obtain exemplars from which to copy texts. The first
Christian missionaries to northern Europe brought a foreign language and a foreign
religion. Soon, however, the clergy of the bishop’s church and the monks in new abbeys
were in need of books for liturgical services, collections of sermons, writings of the
“authorities” of earlier centuries like Augustine or Jerome, and commentaries on
Scripture. Young boys being trained for monastic or clerical service needed instruction in
grammar, rhetoric, music, and the other Liberal Arts. Classical poets were copied and
imitated; the art of letter writing flourished. All required that books be borrowed and
copied and that manuscripts be preserved. Some clue to the nature of early-medieval
libraries at a monastery or cathedral can be gleaned from the works cited by an author
Medieval france: an encyclopedia 1034