Page:The library a magazine of bibliography and library literature, Volume 6.djvu/350

 338 The Library. among the archives of the Holy See, owing to the number of other books there ; but a copy was found in the basilica of St. Peter " in scrinio" where a higher part was reserved for St. Augustine. But the scrinium and the library of the Apostolic See ("bib- liotheca sedis apostolicae "), over which the superintendent of the notaries presided, in the yth century were certainly in the Lateran, for in the formulas used in that century and inserted in the daybook, the archives of the Roman Church and the sacred chest (scrinium) of the Lateran are manifestly one and the same. Cardinal Pitra believed that the famous decree of Pope Gelasius I. (492-496) at the end of the 5th century De libris recipiendis et non recipiendis referred to the Lateran library, and I have already quoted other references to it of an even earlier date. 1 In the council held at Rome against the Monothelites, which was held in the Lateran in 649, books and papers of every kind and in large numbers were brought out on request immediately from the treasury and library and shown, as from a place close by. We have even more precise evidence. By the command of Martin I., Theophylactus the superintendent made extracts from some of the writings of the Saints and of evidence on the heretics. When mention was made in one of the chapters of Cyrus, Bishop of Alexandria, of a saying by Dionysius, Bishop of Athens, in his epistle to Gaius, one of those then present said : " The book of these fathers must be brought." And Theophylactus found it and brought it, not from the chest, but from the venerable library of the See (de venerabili bibliotheca Sedis). From the books asked for and consulted at this Lateran council, brought out on request by Theophylactus, De Rossi has re-constructed some part of the catalogue of the Library of the Holy See in 649. Thirty-three authors are quoted (20 fathers and 13 heretics). We may learn from this how rich the library was of which these can necessarily have only been a small section, in Greek and Latin theological Literature, both eastern and western ; and also that heretical books were diligently preserved. The ninth chapter of his preface De Rossi devotes to the inter- change of books, in the yth century, between the Church at Rome and the nations converted to Christianity ; and in the very title of the chapter, it is gratifying to find he is obliged to mention England as the nation with which pre-eminently (presertim 1 Isidore Carini, La Biblioteca Vaticana (Roma, tip. Vat., 1892), p. 9.