Practice question · True or false
More manuscripts survive from the ninth century alone than from all the preceding centuries of the Latin West put together.
Hints
- The comparison is between one century and everything written before it.
- Bischoff catalogued about seven thousand ninth-century items; the standard catalogue of Latin manuscripts written before 800 lists fewer than two thousand.
Show the answer
True
Why
True, and by a factor of several times over. The asymmetry is why so much classical Latin literature reaches us through a Carolingian copy: for many texts the oldest surviving witness is a ninth-century manuscript, and everything earlier is lost.
Practise Carolingian Europe
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