A labyrinth of charred fragments

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While I was researching libraries recently, I cast around quite widely for books that would give me a broader perspective on the subject, but this one didn’t appear on my radar until my mother gave me a copy for my birthday. This was too late for me to read it for my research, which was already at code red, but it’s been very interesting to get another angle after the event. The Anglo-Saxon Library is an attempt to discern what form the library may have taken in early medieval England, not from historical sources, as they are few and rarely mention libraries, but largely by inference from textual sources. Its author, Michael Lapidge, is one of the world’s leading scholars of Anglo-Saxon England, and particularly of the Latin texts that constitute the majority of its surviving literary heritage. As such, most of his research here goes right over my head, depending as it does on a knowledge of medieval Latin, and frequently of Latin prosody, but it is quite easy to follow his arguments for the layperson willing to accept their ignorance and to take him at his word on the evidence.

The majority of the book consists of appendices in which Lapidge presents the evidence, in the form of inventories of manuscripts, lists of works cited by Anglo-Saxon writers, and so forth. These will be of great value to the researcher intending to work on related areas, or to extend Lapidge’s work, but the only part of the book I gave my attention to was roughly the first third, in which the evidence is deployed discursively in support of some informed speculation regarding the forms taken by Anglo-Saxon libraries. The scholarship is exceptional, and eye-opening: it’s hard to imagine what might be inferred from the scattered and fragmentary textual remains of such a distant era, but Lapidge is able to make a very convincing case for his account of the period’s scholarly book collections.

He begins with an account of the lost libraries of antiquity, and then with those of Anglo-Saxon England, such as they may be inferred from historical sources, and then he attempts to reconstruct the latter, drawing on three main sources of evidence. He examines contemporary inventories of manuscripts, which are rare, the surviving manuscripts themselves, which sometimes disclose where and when they were copied, or from which exemplar, and citations in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, from which he is sometimes able to infer what authorities Anglo-Saxon authors had access to. It was this last area of enquiry that I found made for the most engaging account: watching Lapidge tease out the threads of his various sources of evidence offers a certain sedate thrill, as he determines, for instance, whether a given author knew a Classical text first-hand, or from quotations in other works, or whether the historical evidence suggests that they had access to a particular documented collection of books.

The picture of Anglo-Saxon libraries that emerges is one of relatively small collections of works, kept in book-chests in no particular order. It should be noted that Lapidge’s working definition of a library is of one collected for scholarship, rather than other purposes, such as collections of liturgical texts. The size of the collections reflects the particular purposes for which they were assembled, to whit the interpretation of scripture: the larger libraries of C.9 continental Europe contain much more comprehensive collections of classical literature, including poetry, letters, social commentary and disquisitions on pagan theology, and were assembled over much greater periods of time. In England books were collected as tools to aid in the establishment and maintenance of Christianity, to which end most scholarship was also directed. These smaller collections did not present such a complex challenge in terms of retrieval, any desired text being readily found by means of a quick rummage, to which observation Lapidge ascribes the lack of any indexical markings on manuscripts known to have been held in Anglo-Saxon libraries. The holdings of English monasteries at the time were however sufficient to support some deep and vigorous scholarly endeavour, as evidenced, for example, in the work of the Venerable Bede.

Lapidge opens and closes his discussion with reference to the best known modern literary representations of the library, those of Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco. He begins by observing that the idea of a completable, closed epistemological domain, as implied by the collecting practices of ancient and early medieval libraries, and as explicitly propounded by the blind monk Jorge of Burgos in Eco’s Il nome della rosa, is the same as the idea of an infinite, purgatorial repetition of discourse that Borges imagines in his seminal La biblioteca de Babel. He seals his conclusion by observing that we (and scholars of Anglo-Saxon literary culture in particular) are faced by the symmetric and complementary absurdity, that with which Eco’s narrator is confronted at the close of the novel, piecing together the random, charred fragments of texts recovered form the ruins of the lost labyrinthine library. Lapidge’s scholarship, in terms of making supportable propositions in regard to the literary culture of Anglo-Saxon England, is somewhat tangential to my interests, but it is clearly conducted with great rigour and erudition, and what he has to say about its epistemological implications is of great value to anyone who wonders how knowledge has functioned, and how libraries have related to that function, in the various times and places to which the practice of history attests.