482 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
centuries of our era. Take Petrarch (1314-1374) for example; he 
specialized on Cicero, to whom he actually wrote the first of his 
“Letters to Dead Authors.” Wherever Petrarch went on his travels, 
he always had in mind the possibility of discovering some of Cicero’s 
lost writings, and he never drew near to, or even caught a glimpse of, 
some secluded monastery, without hastening to the spot full of expect- 
ation that there he would find the fruition of his hopes. Petrarch 
realized that the classical works known to him and his contemporaries 
formed but a small part of the great literature that had existed in 
former days. When asked what his object was in these endless 
journeyings, he might have replied in the words of a famous contem- 
porary, “I come to awaken the dead.” That was the keynote of the 
early Renaissance. 
Petrarch was a link between the mediaeval and the modern world: 
he describes himself as ‘placed on the confines of two peoples, and as 
looking backwards as well as forwards.’”’ After him came Boccaccio, 
and in the next century, Poggio (1380-1459). It is through Poggio 
that we begin to approach the Benedictine Monastery of Cluni, which 
he is known to have visited in the year 1415. . Poggio acted as Papal 
Secretary at the Council of Constance (1414-1418) and as he had 
nothing to do while the Apostolic See was vacant, he made these 
years an opportunity for much foreign travel,—Cluni 1415, St. 
Gallen 1416, Langres and other places in France and Germany, 1417. 
From Cluni he is known to have carried off a manuscript of certain 
speeches with which I am not going to deal in this paper, but which we 
are now certain must have been No. 496 in the old Cluni catalogue. 
Poggio’s manuscript has entirely disappeared, and our know- 
ledge of it rests only on certain excerpts. My luck was actually to 
find and to identify the great codex which was No. 498 in the same 
catalogue, and which must therefore, have stood alongside of Poggio’s 
when he made his visit to the Monastery. 
The celebration of the thousandth anniversary of the foundation 
of the great Abbey of Cluni took place only a few years ago,—in 1910. 
Its institution, therefore, takes us back to the year 910, and the 
manuscript which I am describing was probably one of its earliest 
treasures—a prized possession of the Library which grew to be one 
of the most valuable features of the great Monastery. It is interesting 
to recall the fact that till the building of St. Peter’s at Rome, the 
Cluni Abbey was the largest in Europe. The ideal of its foundation 
was that of a “great central monastery upon which depended a 
multitude of religious houses spread over many lands and forming a 
vast feudal hierarchy.’ By the 12th century Cluni is known to have 
had no fewer than 314 monasteries dependent on it in France, Italy, 
