Troncarelli's book focuses on Vivarium, Cassiodorus's monastic foundation in South Italy, and the nature of the Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum ("Principles of Sacred and Secular Literature"), the work he wrote to further his aim of preserving the study of Scripture and of the liberal arts in the sixth century CE. As T. rightly notes, there are many unresolved problems concerning Cassiodorus's legacy to the Latin West, particularly the significance of the Institutiones, the library at Vivarium that it describes and the appearance of the books themselves. T. has written much from a paleographical and codicological point of view about Cassiodorus's manuscripts, and here he takes up in detail arguments that he has set forth elsewhere.[[1]] In addition, T. focuses on the intellectual life in the court of the Ostrogoths and the cultural program of Cassiodorus. Finally, he addresses the question of the fate of Vivarium after the death of Cassiodorus.
One of the new results of T.'s research has been his identification of manuscripts that come from Vivarium, as well as the criteria he has developed to help scholars reconstruct, at least in part, what has been lost. By his comparative study of the few ancient manuscripts that survive and the many medieval copies of manuscripts that may derive from Vivarian archetypes, T. presents a fresh perspective on some aspects of the cultural activity at Vivarium.
When Agapetus was Pope (died April 22, 536), Cassiodorus intended to found a school for the study of Holy Scripture like those at Alexandria and Nisibis. Political events frustrated this plan. In the period that extends from the time of Agapetus to the Pragmatic Sanction of 554 [[2]], the Latin intellectuals in the West faced many pressures and T. examines the writings of Cassiodorus in this context.
After having left his public career and fashioning the Variae, an anthology of his official letters, Cassiodorus wrote his treatise On the Soul. The work is dedicated to a suave collegium of learned friends that in the midst of war did not cease to raise philosophical questions. The work neatly combines the teachings of the Neoplatonic masters and the teachings of the Church.
Cassiodorus's next work, the Commentary on the Psalms, based explicitly on Augustine's Enarrationes, emphasizes the rhetorical, grammatical, and philosophical aspects of the Psalter, making full use of the teachings of the magistri saeculares, to produce a work that combines classical and Christian culture. We see in this extensive commentary the strong and harmonious tie between religion and secular culture, so dear to Cassiodorus.
The mediation of Cassiodorus and Cethegus to blunt the opposition of the allies of Pope Vigilius to the condemnation of the Three Chapters can be seen as part of this intellectual framework. At the end of the Psalm Commentary Cassiodorus praised the writing of Facundus of Hermione in defense of the condemned authors, but later he did not hesitate to take a different side, as he also inserted praises of the school of Nisibis in the Institutiones.
It is in this context that T. places the composition of the second book of the Institutiones (on secular letters) in its early redaction. T. suggests that Cassiodorus composed this handbook to meet specific cultural and political needs of a group that required a basic text for the development of its own ideas. T. believes that Institutiones II served many of the same functions as the De Nuptiis of Martianus Capella, which had already been a guide to cultural initiatives promoted earlier by Pope Agapetus. T. adds that Cassiodorus deserves credit for having improved on Martianus by including Boethius's treatises on logic and mathematics. Like his earlier Psalm Commentary, the Institutiones is a guide for those who wished to be initiated into the enkuklios paedeia. It also provided a general introduction to knowledge for those who wished to deepen their scriptural studies in the spirit of the school that he had sketched out in the time of Agapetus. T. agrees with Barnish, who says, "The Institutiones are, of course, intended primarily for Vivarium.... But we have only to look at the Variae and the Expositio [in Psalmos] to see that Cassiodorus did not necessarily mean his work to serve a single public." [[3]]
After discussing this intellectual background, T. turns to the problems of the various workings and reworkings of the Institutiones. Cassiodorus made several redactions of the work, which had also been revised by the monks of Vivarium after Cassiodorus's death. The generally accepted view, formulated by Courcelle and recently reconfirmed by Holtz, holds that there were at least two fundamental redactions: a first "sketch" that can be dated before 551, and a definitive redaction finished shortly before the death of Cassiodorus. Mynors's edition rests on this second version. Holtz found a third redaction by Cassiodorus which is reflected in the citations in Isidore of Seville and Paul the Deacon.
Courcelle based his thesis on a careful examination of the variants, which cannot be explained in any other way. He does not, however, explain how Cassiodorus composed a preliminary "sketch" of a treatise intended for the monks of Vivarium at a time when Vivarium did not yet exist. Several scholars have supposed that Cassiodorus immediately retired to Vivarium after he left public office (i.e., in 540), and this view helps justify the theory of a "sketch." But this has an insurmountable difficulty: Cassiodorus was certainly in Constantinople between 550 and 551, and he seems to have already been there for some time.
T. attacks the problem by starting from different suppositions. He rejects the idea that Institutiones II was a "sketch" and considers it as a finished text that was meant for a particular public between the years 536 and 554. In his view, the second book of the Institutiones is a fixed text, a handbook complete in itself. T.'s thesis, which dismisses some introductory pages and references to a first book, suggests that the text was probably intended for students of the school in Rome or for students of a future school of theological studies, and anyone else who wanted an introduction to the study of the liberal arts in a time of war and threats to Latin culture.
At this period Cassiodorus also produced other models of study for the Catholic intellectual class, a group independent of Vivarium and centered at Ravenna and Rome. This helps set the foundation of Vivarium in 554, after the return of the exiles to Italy. In my own view, T. thus makes better sense of the facts at our disposal, and avoids the problems created by a hypothesis that Vivarium was founded in 540.
After his return from Constantinople, Cassiodorus went to Squillace in southern Italy, where he founded the monastery of Vivarium on his estate. T. sees the monastery as a continuation of Cassiodorus's attempt to found a school in collaboration with Pope Agapetus, but I doubt that this was his aim. In my view, the Psalm Commentary makes it clear that Cassiodorus intended these texts for self-study. T. sees a dual purpose in Cassiodorus's handbooks on the liberal arts and commentary on the Psalms: to create a new Catholic intellectual elite to restore the Latin ruling class a leading position in Italian society, and to put its students on an equal cultural and religious footing with the Byzantines. This is an attractive view, and fits well into central ideas of the sixth century in the West, but depends on factors of which we are historically unsure.
T.'s study of the character of the fixed redaction of the first version of Institutiones II is more soundly based. Drawing on a codicological analysis of the two families of manuscripts, delta and phi, he concludes that the two families are separate. From the codicological point of view there are variants which reflect two different traditions starting from two different archetypes. The earliest seems to be the family delta. The model, T. observes, was a late antique model of special quality, much like manuscripts which may have been written under the direction of Cassiodorus. T. says that it was written at Vivarium, but offers no proof of this.
The pages of these copies also look like Vivarian products: the text contains many geometric designs, which T. regards as memory-aids (another unproven assumption), with the designs placed at the beginning of the page. T. argues that the so-called "interpolations" of this family are only additions made by the monks of Vivarium at a later date following suggestions made by Cassiodorus. He considers this method of work comparable to what happened in the workshop of a medieval or Renaissance painter where paintings begin from a book or models or designs of the master. I would suggest instead that it is in the nature of the ancient handbook to be revised, enlarged, and altered, following a tradition well-known to us from ancient scholia. In any case, T.'s assertion that this "sketch" is in fact a definitive text for a public accustomed to accurate and elegant editions seems most unlikely. Handbooks are utilitarian instruments and hardly lend themselves to deluxe editions. We need only look at a variety of ancient grammatical texts of the fifth century such as appear in Naples Lat. 2 (Vindobon. 16) [CLA 3.397a and 398, in a cursive half-uncial, Lowe's "quarter uncial"].
The codicological examination does confirm Courcelle's hypothesis concerning the dating of the first redaction of Institutiones II, a dating that is strengthened by an incorrect reference to Priscian as a Greek writer in redaction delta. Cassiodorus later corrected this error in the final redaction of the work and in his De orthographia. Nevertheless, T's suggestion that this error indicates that Cassiodorus wrote the first version of Institutiones II before he went to Constantinople is not persuasive.
T. also reinterprets the genesis of Institutiones I. He argues that it was composed in the years when Cethegus was still alive and active and reflects the original spirit that led to the monastic foundation: the recreation of the Christian school Cassiodorus had envisioned in the time of Agapetus, in which, like the schools of Alexandria, one studied secular letters as an introduction to the Scriptures. Such a study reflects the interests of men like Symmachus and Boethius. This explains the presence of Greek terminology in redaction delta and the fragments that refer to Ammonius and to Neoplatonism.[[4]] According to T., Cassiodorus was writing for the kinds of readers who regarded philosophy as a kind of religious exercise, and asserts that the first monks of Vivarium were such readers, perhaps themselves members of the aristocracy and other Latin clerics who felt the need for a deeper sense of doctrine. This view goes far beyond the evidence at our disposal. But such an orientation may be behind archetype phi.
Over twenty years had passed since Agapetus and Cassiodorus dreamed of starting a theological school at Rome. In these years the world changed, and thus also the nature of the project. Italy was in ruins, and Rome survived as a shadow of what it had been. Books were still available at Rome and Ravenna. T. makes the good and necessary point that Cassiodorus was well aware of the library resources of Eugippius at his monastery at Naples and those of the African churches. Consequently the romantic picture of Cassiodorus working in isolation to save Western culture must be rejected, and the existence of monastic libraries and scriptoria active in the late antique period must be recognized and appreciated.
When Cassiodorus was in his ninetieth year, he had realized his dream of organizing a library, a place to conserve, as well as to promote study and spiritual formation. He intended it to serve a group of readers who worked in common and who were able to make use of the resources he put at their disposal. For this school without teachers other than the books and perhaps the genius of the founder, T. suggests that Cassiodorus finally created a catalogue raisoné in the first book of the Institutiones. In fact, a close study of Institutiones I gives the impression rather of a list of recommended books than of a list of books actually owned by the library.[[5]]
There is much of value in this study and many insights and facts that will be of considerable importance to any future study of Cassiodorus and his monastic foundation of Vivarium. T. has shifted the focus of our attention on Cassiodorus and his work from the texts to the physical supports for these texts, and to their intellectual, social, and political background. This marks a considerable advance, for it takes us beyond the evidence so carefully worked out by Courcelle and his followers. The reviewer must admit, however, that he is not yet fully convinced by T.'s arguments concerning the Vivarian origin of certain early manuscripts, and the direct influence of Vivarian exemplars on the appearance of later medieval copies. Nor are his arguments concerning the use of diagrams in the manuscripts or the presence of bookcases at Vivarium as part of a Theater of Memory for Cassiodorus at all convincing. It is much more likely that the manuscript diagrams were used for the organizing of data, as they had been used previously by such scholars as Marius Victorinus, and that the arrangement of the books was for the same purpose. T.'s knowledge of the use of diagrams in texts is not sufficiently profound, and, indeed, a thorough study of diagrams in ancient books and their medieval successors is still waiting to be done.
T. has added much important detail to the work of Courcelle, which is now over a half century old. This monograph will be essential for anyone interested in the development of Christian studies in late antiquity and its future in medieval Europe.[[6]] _____________
NOTES
1. Especially his lengthy study, "I codici di Cassiodoro," whose results are included in this monograph.
2. Briefly, according to the Pragmatic Sanction, Italy was made a province of the Byzantine Empire, with its capital still at Ravenna; the Ostrogothic Kingdom was dissolved.
3. Barnish, 179.
4. T. refers his readers to Courcelle's Late Latin Writers, 331-360.
5. As Teutsch says, "the extensive excerpts from texts in the Institutiones [especially in Book II] make it much more likely that the cited books were not to be found in this library, and that Cassiodorus, by the reproduction of their essential contents spared the monastery the purchase of them. It is also very likely that certain books need not, because they are recommended in the Institutiones, actually have existed in the Vivarium library; nowhere in that work is there a hint that it was Cassiodorus's desire that the reader of his work should seek his knowledge only within the walls of that monastery" (223).
6. There are some minor typographical and footnote errors which I have sent on to the author. There is only one point worth questioning. In several place, T. states that James J. O'Donnell in his book on Cassiodorus states that Vivarium was a Christian university. I cannot find this anywhere in O'Donnell's book and in personal conversation O'Donnell denies that he made any such statement.
WORKS CITED
Barnish, S. "The Work of Cassiodorus After His Conversion." Latomus 48 (1989):157-187. Courcelle, P. "Histoire d'un brouillon cassiodorien." Revue des Études Anciennes 44 (1942):65-86. (= Opuscula Selecta. Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1984. 77-86).
-----. Late Latin Writers and Their Greek Sources. Translated H.E. Wedeck. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969.
Holtz, L. "Quelques aspects de la tradition et de la diffusion des Institutiones." Atti di settimana di studi su Flavio Magno Aurelio Cassiodoro (Cosenza-Squillace, 19-24 settembre 1983). S. Leanza, ed. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 1986. 281-312.
O'Donnell, James J. Cassiodorus. Berkeley: U of California P, 1979. Teutsch, Leo. "Cassiodorus Senator. Gründer der Klosterbibliothek von Vivarium." Libri 9 (1959):215-239.
Troncarelli, F. "I codici di Cassiodoro: Le testimonianze più antiche," Scrittura e civiltà 12 (1988):47-99 + 16 pl.