MONASTIC COLLECTION. Despite the important work done by a few of the monasteries in preserving and advancing learning, large collections of books were unknown before the Revival of Learning, in the fourteenth century. The process of book production in itself was very slow, and many of the volumes produced were later lost through fire, or pillage by new invaders. During the early days of wood construction a number of monastic and church libraries were burned by accident. In the pillaging of the Danes and Northmen on the coasts of England and northern France, in the ninth and tenth centuries, a number of important monastic collections there were lost. In Italy the Lombards destroyed some collections in their sixth-century invasion, and the Saracens burned some in southern Italy in the ninth. Monte Cassino, among other monasteries, was destroyed by both the Lombards and the Saracens. From a number of extant catalogues of old monastic libraries we know that, even as late as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a library of from two to three hundred volumes was large. [15] The catalogues show that most of these were books of a religious nature, being monastic chronicles, manuals of devotion, comments on the Scriptures, lives of miracle-working saints, and books of a similar nature (Rs. 55, 56). A few were commentaries on the ancient learning, or mediaeval textbooks on the great subjects of study of the time (R. 60). A still smaller number were copies of old classical literary works, and of the utmost value (R. 57).
THE CONVENTS AND THEIR SCHOOLS. The early part of the Middle Ages also witnessed a remarkable development of convents for women, these receiving a special development in Germanic lands. Filled with the same aggressive spirit as the men, but softened somewhat by Christianity, many women of high station among the German tribes founded convents and developed institutions of much renown. This provided a rather superior class of women as organizers and directors, and a conventual life continued, throughout the entire Middle Ages, to attract an excellent class of women. This will be understood when it is remembered that a conventual life offered to women of intellectual ability and scholarly tastes the one opportunity for an education and a life of learning. The convents, too, were much earlier and much more extensively opened for instruction to those not intending to take the vows than was the case with the monasteries, and, in consequence, it became a common practice throughout the Middle Ages, just as it is to-day among Catholic families, to send girls to the convent for education and for training in manners and religion. Many well-trained women were produced in the convents of Europe in the period from the sixth to the thirteenth centuries.