[324] Not a single manuscript other than those texts concerned with the material interests of the see which may be securely associated with the scriptorium of Compostela during this period has yet been identified; possibly none has survived. Given this absence of materials which are rightly regarded as fundamental to an enquiry into this topic, there is very little that may be said.

Diego himself was not an 'intellectual'. He possessed the skills that a man in his position needed: familiarity with Visigothic law and with canon law.⁽¹⁾ He was aware of certain needs: for up-to-date canon law texts; for a reasonably well-educated cathedral chapter. He appointed foreign teachers to the office of magister scolarum in his cathedral church. The first of these was Gerald, who held office between c. 1118 and c. 1134. He was almost certainly a native of Beauvais, whose school was by no means undistinguished in the years about 1100. The second was a more shadowy figure, master Rainerio of Pistoia, who had studied in England, at Winchester (Quintonia in Anglia), and who seems to have succeeded Gerald during Diego's later years.⁽²⁾ Diego encouraged promising young men to go to France to study. [325] It is significant that in Diego's day and later on higher education was something that was not available in Compostela.⁽³⁾

Diego presented the cathedral library with a few books.⁽⁴⁾ Apart from liturgical books these included a librum pastoralem (Gregory the Great's Cura Pastoralis?), a book of canones (the Polycarpus?), a librum de fide trinitatis et de aliis sententiis (Augustine?), a librum de vita episcoporum (another candidate for the Cura Pastoralis? or perhaps some historical or hagiographical compilation?), and a theological compendium of some kind described as a librum ex diversis sententiis.

The Historia Compostellana is the only literary monument to the learning of Compostela in Diego's day. It can hardly be called a striking one. At its best its Latin is unadorned; at its worst, swollen and repetitive. But this is to judge it by twentieth-century canons of taste: it deserves the attention of a good Latinist.⁽⁵⁾ Apart from the Bible there are occasional citations or reminiscences of Augustine (pp. 391, 579), Boethius (213), Cicero (587), Gregory the Great (205, 568), Horace (368) and Virgil (198, 334). In other words, there are no surprises. It is noteworthy that all these citations occur in those sections of the work which were composed by immigrants. It is also worthy of note that the author who was a native of Galicia twice took pride in the fact that on one occasion his bishop and on another occasion one of his colleagues were able to address assemblies in Latin.⁽⁶⁾

Such intellectual activity as there was at Compostela seems to have been directed almost exclusively to the [326] consolidation and defence of rights claimed or exercised by bishop and chapter. This preoccupation contrasts markedly with the state of affairs in other churches which were under-going intellectual modernization at this period; for example, the Canterbury of Lanfranc and Anselm.⁽⁷⁾

Lastly, it is only fair to point out that Galician scriptoria during the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries must have been kept so busy churning out the new liturgical books required by the change from the Visigothic to the Roman liturgy that their scribes would have had little if any time for copying other manuscripts. The change had officially occurred in 1080. But if even so important a monastic house as Samos had not equipped itself with the new texts by 1098,⁽⁸⁾ one wonders when -- and how -- the parishes of the remoter parts of the diocese of Compostela acquired their new mass-books.

1. Visigothic law: Diego's remarks on sanctuary at HC, p. 228 seem to recall Lex Visigothorum, IX.3.1-2 (ed. Zeumer, p. 379). Canon law: HC, p. 166, from Polycarpus, VI.10.24 (ex Burchard, ex Isidore); HC, p. 178, from Polycarpus,VII.11.4 (ex Burchard); cf. also the citation of canon law in the episode of the Traba inheritance, HC, p. 477. Cardinal Gregory's work had not been wasted.

2. Acta Sanctorum, Iulii, VI, pp. 26-7. This is the earliest reference to a school at Winchester in the twelfth century which we possess. Rainerio's studies at Winchester must have preceded by at least twenty years the tenure there as master of Jordan Fantosme attested in a letter of John of Salisbury of 1154-8, hitherto regarded as the earliest mention of the school: see N. Orme, English schools in the middle ages (London, 1973), p. 320. I owe this point to Dr P. P. A. Biller.

3. HC, pp. 238, 346; LFH IV, ap. xl, pp. 99-101 (of 1169).

4. HC, pp. 379-80.

5. For the authors' use of the cursus see A. G. Biggs, Diego Gelmírez, first archbishop of Compostela (Washington, 1949), pp. xxxvi-xl.

6. HC, pp. 79, 87. See also the important study of R. Wright, Late Latin and Early Romance in Spain and Carolingian France (Liverpool, 1982), chs. 4 and 5, especially pp. 220-7. Dr Wright convincingly argues that what is being referred to here is not knowledge of the Latin language as such but knowledge of 'Medieval Latin', that is, a new way of spelling and pronouncing the Latin language introduced from France into Spain after 1080.

7. See R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm and his biographer (Cambridge, 1963) and M. Gibson, Lanfranc of Bec (Oxford, 1978).

8. AHN 1240/1 (forcing the sense a little, I must confess).