Ugh.

It genuinely bothers me that this book won so many awards by trotting out the same old worn out tripe about the middle ages that credulous or self-interested scholars have since literally Petrarch. The reviews I read near universally agree that Greenblatt's prose is excellent, but the general consensus was that his depiction of the middle ages is rife with factual errors. This is one of them.

It's difficult to know where to start with this, because it's just so many different kinds of wrong. Firstly, it is a mistake to think of Medieval Christianity in this time as particularly organized, or even capable of carrying out a systemic destruction of pagan literature. The church was diffuse and localized, and far more power was held by bishops, abbots and local potentates than the Pope in Rome, so the idea of a unified church purging pagan records is something of an anachronism (My suspicion is that Greenblatt is thinking of the church like the Renaissance Scholar that he is, and projecting Catholic persecution of Protestants back onto the early medieval period).

At a deeper level, though, Greenblatt deeply misinterprets the goings on in the intellectual post roman world. The collapse of the Empire caused a huge drop in scholarly activity, no one denies this, but the Church was not at all the reason for this. In the empire, an education was both a sign of elite power and cultivation, and a way for the less elite to get ahead. An elite roman was EXPECTED, as a cultural matter, to know Greek, and to be able to engage on some level with poetry and rhetoric and philosophy and so on. For someone, like, say, Augustine, who was not from an elite family, the great expense of his education was worth it, because it gave him opportunities for professional advancement as a tutor, a lawyer, or any number of similar "thought economy" type positions. (Even later, after his conversion, I think it's pretty clear Augustine's education in classical rhetoric and literature aided him in becoming an effective writer and theologian, which is why we remember him today). That all changed after the fall of the empire, though the late antique scholars will tell you this was not as sudden and radical a process as it is often imagined popularly.

Still, though, as the population ruralized and the administrative structures of the empire fell apart, there was less need for educated people to grease the wheels of empire. Simultaneously, a new, warrior aristocracy came to power, which did not prioritize the same imagery of cultivation or education that the Roman elite did. In other words, fewer nobles got a classical education, simply because it wasn't as much the "done thing." (Again, there are exceptions here. The Ostrogoths in Italy, for example, took on many of the trappings of Roman lordship, including classical poetry and rhetoric, and it was only later, after years of destructive conflict in the region, that this became less the case.) What that meant was that suddenly, there simply wasn't the money to support the Roman educational system. Schools closed, fewer people were educated, literacy declined across the board, along with trade, urbanization, and all those other sorts of things. (I also want to sidenote that to us moderns, this seems bad, or like a regression, but it's important to note that these things were sustained by the violent force of the Roman extractive state. There's some evidence that this "decline" reduced extractive burdens on the peasantry, and that their nutrition and financial situation improved as a result.)

The cases where this does not happen, where texts are preserved, where schools stay open, where education continue almost universally have one thing in common: The Medieval Church. Demand for education now was almost exclusively for the purpose of educating clergymen, and local religious potentates were often the only people with the desire and resources to preserve the roman education system, and to what extent they could, they usually did. Early Christian education, such as it was, was largely continuous with Classical Roman education! It was common, for example, for 7th Century British monks to learn their Latin Grammar from books of pagan mythology. Now, Greenblatt isn't wrong to say that classical texts were copied less, but you have to understand the circumstances. Copying a book is an extremely resource intense process in this time. A single calfskin, for example, produces 3-4 sheets of Vellum, 12-16 pages at most if each is folded in half to make a bifolio, meaning that a single manuscript could require the slaughter of 10-20 animals, as well as other materials like ink and quills. It also required hours and hours of labor by an elite, well educated professional. In a time when both those elite professionals and the money to buy those materials were in short supply, ruthless prioritization was necessary. Unsurprisingly, early Christian authors prioritized important Christian texts, which meant that Pagan Classical texts were copied less (though this was not a complete halt, by any means, as Greenblatt suggests).

Greenblatt is at least marginally more nuanced than most of these takes, because he realizes that this changes fairly quickly. By the time of Charlemagne, people started to realize that these texts were in danger of dying out, and the consolidated Frankish empire provided more resources to change that, and copying intensified greatly. This copying, it should be noted, was still carried out mostly by churchmen, certainly a surprising and sudden reversal if Greenblatt is correct. Indeed, avid interest in the study of the classics was common throughout the middle ages, and while it certainly increased as time went on, this was more a product of economic growth and population increase than any magical change in the intellectual waters. It's no coincidence that the most intense growth in this interest in classical learning and art happened in two of the richest and most urbanized parts of Medieval Europe: Northern Italy and the Low Countries.

With that all said, I want to take make a little postscript to critique Greenblatt's notion of monastic copying as a rote, unintellectual process. This is simply untrue! Every page was precious, and as such intense thought went into the choosing and organization of the texts on the page. These organization choices can be a little difficult for us to understand, since we don't usually have records of why they were made, but they are clearly there. Furthermore, an important part of the copying process, and medieval intellectual life in general, was the "glossing" of the texts. As copyists wrote, they'd often make marginal notes, explaining the meanings of particular words or expounding on a philosophical point. In pagan texts, it's pretty clear that many Christian writers copied them out specifically so they could engage with them, argue with them, or find evidence for their faith within the texts. Lively intellectual engagement was the norm, not suppression and fear. Even in cases where we don't have glossing, no one spent the tremendous effort to produce a book to let it moulder on a shelf. Every book was a precious object, and they were treated as such.