Page:Readings in European History Vol 1.djvu/44

 8 Readings in European History he was in search. He was forced to travel from place to place and turn over masses of worthless or irrelevant matter in the uncertain quest for the little which might be useful to him. But all this is changed. The scholar may now sit at a convenient desk in a comfortable, well-lighted library ; investigation. h e nas a clearly printed book before him, the text of which has been established by a comparison of all the known manuscripts of the work in question. These have been collated by an expert ; errors have been elimi- nated, and difficult passages annotated. The work has been carefully analyzed and supplied with an index, so that one may discover in a few moments just those paragraphs which have to do with the subject in hand. HOW the The task of rendering the sources available has been been panted a l n anc ^ painful one, and has been going on for three inconvenient or f our hundred years. As early as the sixteenth cen- collections. tury scholars began to bring together the mediaeval chronicles and print them in convenient collections. In the time of Louis XIV a group of Benedictine monks in France won new distinction for their ancient order by publishing several admirable series and by preparing treatises to facilitate historical research. The nineteenth century witnessed a development of the critical scientific spirit which has made it necessary to reprint many sources that had appeared previously in a defective form. Moreover, thousands of volumes of precious material hitherto available only in manuscript have been added to our resources. The The most notable of the many collections is that which Monumenta -ui_ r i i /~ o/r Germaniae nas " een in course of publication in Germany since 1826, Historica. the Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Begun under