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Transmitting Treasures of Ancient Learning
turies. They are fragments representing a large historical
literature that has perished. 1
IRISH GENEALOGY OF CAROLINGIAN SCHOOLS
3.
We shall see as we proceed in what manner and by what
methods the medieval Irish trustees of civilization trans-
mitted to the newer races the treasure in their keeping.
But already one of the paths of that transmission lies open
before us. Speculation has been rife as to the source from
which Charlemagne and his contemporaries drew their
inspiration in the establishment of the cathedral and
monastic schools of their time. The speculation has in-
variably ended in a blind alley, for the average historian,
knowing little of Ireland and her civilization, and seeking
for his phenomena an ancestry in the easily accessible
where no ancestry existed, has been content to construct
a genealogy with its medieval generations dubious or
missing. Yet the maternal relation of Ireland to the epis-
era is
copal schools and seminaries of the Carolingian
plainly as authentic as her relation of maternity to the
men who conducted them. Whether all these men were
Irish or not does not affect that relation. They were al-
most all Irish in any case, and such of them as were not,
like Alcuin and Rhabanus Maur, were representatives of
Irish learning.
We know that in the Carolingian era Irish scholars
swamped Gaul and Germany and Italy. For over the
two preceding centuries they had been sounding in European
lands the evangel of a higher intellectual life. No
thinker of the time could escape their influence and the
i "The books of saga, poetry and annals that have come down to our day,
though so vastly more ancient and numerous than anything the rest of western
Europe has to show, are yet an almost inappreciable fragment of the
literature that at one time existed in Ireland": (Hyde, Literary History of
Ireland, 263).
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