from certain monasteries a number of books. Virgil, Horace, Juvenal, Avienus are specially named, and also the epigrams of Adelelmus, who is no other than our English Aldhelm. The fact that Aldhelm was read in Spain in the ninth century is worth noting. We remember how Aldhelm himself at the end of the seventh century read Julian of Toledo and Eugenius.
A chapter of history yet unwritten will most likely disclose many unsuspected threads of connexion between Ireland, Britain, and Spain. In the making of it the rôle of the liturgiologist will be an important one.
We return to Central Europe. A good deal of space in the last chapter was devoted to Greek learning and to Irish culture. Now that we have passed to the middle years of the ninth century, both subjects come before us again. Their representatives are in the first instance Johannes Scottus Eriugena and Sedulius Scottus, but these are only the protagonists. There was a crowd of minor personages, some few of whom will claim separate notice. The testimony of the time is that imperial and royal courts and the palaces of the great ecclesiastics were thronged with needy "Scotti," all learned in their various ways, all willing to teach, and all seeking (not always in the most dignified terms) shelter and maintenance. Heiric of Auxerre, writing about 876, represents the influx of Irish scholars as due to the enlightened liberality of Charles the Bald. "Ireland, despising the dangers of the sea, is migrating almost en masse with her crowd of philosophers to our shores, and all the most learned doom themselves to voluntary exile to attend the bidding of Solomon the wise." But this was not the sole or even the chief reason. As the rhetoricians of Gaul had been driven into Ireland by one set of invasions, so now the Irish were driven out of it by another, that of the Scandinavian pirates who had already done so much mischief in England. We cannot doubt that lamentable destruction of books took place in Ireland too, but we know little or nothing about established libraries there.
We first hear of John the Scot at the court of Charles the Bald in 845, and his first continental writing was on predestination against Gottschalk (851). Not very long after, in 858-860, he made his first important translation from Greek, of the works called of Dionysius the Areopagite. The copy he used was most likely one which in 827 the Greek Emperor, Michael, had given to the Abbey of St Denis[1]. Hilduin, Abbot of that house, had done his best to establish the identity of the patron of the Abbey with the Areopagite, and the identification was commonly accepted throughout the medieval period.
It is generally agreed that John knew Greek before he left Ireland. This would make it natural to commit to him the task of rendering the very difficult language and matter of Dionysius into Latin. But the
- ↑ Now at Paris (B. N. Gr. 437).
