Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

by Tom Holland

Yet this imposed on Charlemagne a ferocious obligation: for how could God’s law possibly be written on the hearts of the Christian people if they were not properly Christian? Without education, they were doomed; without education, they could not be brought to Christ. Correctio, Charlemagne termed his mission: the schooling of his subjects in the authentic knowledge of God. ‘May those who copy the pronouncements of the holy law and the hallowed sayings of the fathers sit here.’15 Such was the prayer that Alcuin, following his appointment as abbot of Tours in 797, ordered to be inscribed over the room where monks would toil daily at their great task of writing. Under his leadership, the monastery became a powerhouse of penmanship. Its particular focus was the production of single-volume collections of scripture. Edited by Alcuin himself, these were written to be as user-friendly as possible. No longer did words run into one another. Capital letters were deployed to signal the start of new sentences. For the first time, a single stroke like a lightning-flash was introduced to indicate doubt: the question mark. Each compendium of scripture, so one monk declared, was ‘a library beyond compare’.16 In ancient Alexandria, it had been called ta biblia ta hagia, ‘the holy books’ – and in time, so as to emphasise the unique holiness of what they were producing, monks in Francia would transliterate the Greek word biblia into Latin. The Old and New Testaments would come to be known sim...