Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/84

66 for more than they cared to acknowledge, to the materials provided them in the works of the Scot. But in the dark age that followed, those writings seem to have been almost unknown. Early in the tenth century, indeed, we meet with an extract from a poem apparently of John's composition, and a passage from the Division of Nature is cited in a theological treatise written a little later; but in neither case is the source of the quotation indicated. Then, again, when the Scot's book On the Body and Blood of Christ obtained a sudden notoriety in the dispute raised by Berengar of Tours on the nature of the sacrament, the importance attached to his authority by the opponent of transubstantiation is valuable as evidence of the power that his name still possessed; but it is nearly certain that the work to which Berengar appealed, and which was burnt by the council of Vercelli, was the production not of John but of his contemporary the monk Ratramnus. A solitary trace of John's influence may be found in the fact that, probably through some glosses of his, the Satyricon of Martianus Capella soon came to take once more that recognised place in the schools which it had held centuries earlier in the dark days of Gregory of Tours; but the acceptance of this meagre compendium only shews how incapable his heirs were of appreciating the treasure he had left them in his own works.