B004R9Q09U EBOK (15 page)

While the monastic scribes did their best to preserve the heritage of written thought inside the monasteries, outside the cloister most people had reverted to the old ways of oral folk traditions and symbolism. For most of the thousand years before Gutenberg, reading was an almost entirely lost art.

In the eighth century, Europe witnessed a brief renewal of lit
eracy when King Charlemagne instituted a revival of book learning in his imperial court, echoing the literary ambitions of the old empires. Although the so-called Carolingian Renaissance would ultimately falter, it sparked a resurgence of interest in books and reading that marked a high point of literate culture in the era before Gutenberg.

Like Ashurbanipal and Ptolemy I before him, Charlemagne recognized the political potency of a great imperial library. Unlike any other European king of the era, he also seems to have harbored a deep personal passion for reading. Throughout his reign he devoted enormous resources to building a library fit for an emperor. When Charlemagne needed to find a suitably learned man to build his great library, he looked across the channel to England, whose scribes had by 782 established the English monasteries as Europe’s literary powerhouse. He invited a renowned scholar from York named Alcuin to his court, charging him with assembling the greatest library in Christendom. After arriving at Charlemagne’s court, Alcuin soon sent word back to his old school in York:

Alcuin collected works by Statius, Lucian, Terence, Juvenal, Tibullus, Horace, Claudian, Martial, Servius, and Cicero, among many others. The English monk set about establishing not only a great imperial library but also a central repository for distributing template manuscripts to be copied and disseminated widely across the growing empire. To that end Alcuin introduced a new simplified style of script, now known as Carolingian minuscule, that enabled monks to copy works more quickly to speed up the distribution of texts across the far-flung empire. The letters you are now reading on this page are the direct typographic descendants of Carolingian minuscule.

As the Carolingian libraries grew, monastic librarians began rec
ognizing a need to keep better track of their assets. A few monks began listing their books chronologically. Eventually, some of them began creating higher-level categorical schemes, usually derived from Cassiodorus’s system. At the Abbey of Saint Riquier, monks separated the books into discrete collections: one section for the Bible and theological works, one section for school books and grammars, and a third section for liturgical texts. “As humanism sought to recapture the sublimities of ancient Latin, on the one hand, and to authenticate Scriptures—and the power of the church—on the other,” writes Battles, “its libraries recapitulated the symmetries of classical antiquity.”
¹⁵

Within each category the books would be arranged in a rough chronology (alphabetical order would not emerge again until the twelfth century). As monks copied each other’s texts, they became increasingly interested in the questions of librarianship: Which texts should they acquire, and how should they be organized? For guidance in developing their collections, monastic librarians would consult popular bibliographical works like Jerome’s
De viris illustribus
and Cassiodorus’s
Institutiones
—seminal guides to book collecting that would provide monastic librarians with a template for growing their collections. As these standardized bibliographies began to circulate among medieval libraries, they provided the foundation for an emerging scholarly network. Libraries began coordinating their collections, arranging them with similar structures, and learning to rely on each other for access to hard-to-find works.

In 1170 the first known “scrutinium” or catalog emerged—a reckoning of the monastery’s collection of books. “With this invention,” write Illich and Sanders, “the book became dislocated from the sacristy.” The Sorbonne established the first Union Catalog. The 1495 catalog of the Carthusian cloister Salvatorberg in Erfurt stands as the largest known catalog of the late Middle Ages. It contains a list of authors arranged chronologically (rather than alphabetically), with each entry accompanied by a brief biographical sketch of the author, along with cross-references to other works by the same authors. These catalogs, all printed as codex books, provide a glimpse into the emerging semantic structure of medieval libraries.

In Rome, Pope Sixtus IV initiated the great expansion of the Vatican Library, establishing the role of
scriptores
or, roughly, curators of the collection (a position that has persisted at the library ever since). The Vatican Library catalog of 1475 offers a revealing glimpse into the evolving organization of knowledge in the world’s most powerful institution. The library adopted Cassiodorus’s convention of splitting its books into sacred and secular collections. “Up one side of the great library ran a series of tables with books chained to them; on the opposite side ran a series of secular works that roughly paralleled the arrangement of the sacred texts. The library must have looked something like this:

The next room contained works in Greek, broken down along similar lines. The Vatican catalog’s semantic balancing act would fail to hold up over time, but it marked an important impulse toward reasserting an institutional hierarchy as a means of preserving intellectual order.

The efforts of the monastic scriptoria would reverberate for centuries to come. The organizational schemes of these libraries proved remarkably durable. Indeed, the heritage of the modern library catalog traces its lineage directly back to the catalogs of Cassiodorus.

While the European monasteries played an important role in preserving classical texts, their collections remained paltry compared to the great libraries that were taking shape a world away in the lands of Islam. “Bagdad in its glory abounded with libraries,” writes library historian James Westfall Thompson. Before the city fell to the
Mongols in 1258, there were no fewer than 36 libraries in the great city, supplied by more than 100 book dealers tending stalls in the great bazaars. The last vizier, Ibn al-Alkami, personally owned 10,000 books. The historian Omar al-Waqidi is said to have possessed 120 camel loads of books, while a scholar named al-Baiquai needed 36 hampers and two trunks to transport his collection. Legend has it the library at Tripoli held three million books, including 50,000 Korans (although historians believe those numbers were probably exaggerated). In Cairo the caliph al-Aziz established a school library with 100,000 volumes (some say 600,000) of bound books, including 2,400 Korans illuminated in gold and silver. The collection also included books on law, grammar, rhetoric, history, biography, astronomy, and chemistry. The library stored its collections in large presses behind a series of locked doors, each with a list of the books contained inside nailed into the front. In 1004 AD the caliph al-Hakim opened a so-called House of Wisdom in Cairo, said to contain 1.6 million books.
¹⁶
In contrast to the closely held literary treasures of the European monasteries, the caliph threw his library doors open to the public.

While Europe languished in the Dark Ages, Islamic libraries flourished, preserving a huge swath of the heritage of classical thought. Greek, Hindu, and Persian books found their way by the thousands into the great libraries of Islam. The rise of Islamic libraries seems at first like an improbable outcome. Mohammed did not read or write, and the indigenous Arab tribes had no written heritage. Traditionally, they were storytellers, preserving their legends, poetry, and genealogies through oral transmission. Thanks to a confluence of
historical circumstances, these nomadic storytelling people became the curators of the ancient world’s philosophical legacy.

Ancient books followed a circuitous path to the Arab world. When the emperor Justinian closed the great school of Athens, seven of its most prominent teachers went into exile, eventually finding refuge in Persia. They brought their books with them. Before long Persia became a repository for Greek philosophy, poetry, and science. Hundreds of translators (mostly Hellenized Syrians) arrived to translate the great works of classical antiquity from Greek to Persian. When the Arabs later conquered Persia, they assumed control of this great body of texts, which they proceeded to translate into Arabic. After centuries of isolation and illiteracy, the Arabs (like the Irish) experienced an abrupt, dramatic encounter with the literary heritage of the ancients. And like the Irish, that encounter would reshape their culture. For more than 500 years the Arabs went on to foster a period of scholarship that would fuel their rise to regional dominance and technological progress that made early medieval Europe seem, by comparison, like a cultural backwoods. As Gibbon put it, “The age of Arabian learning continued about five hundred years … and was coeval with the darkest and most slothful period of European annals.”
¹⁸

In Baghdad, Cairo, and Cordova, learned Jews played an important role in the expansion of Muslim philosophy, producing generations of diligent scholars who contributed to the expansion of learning in the Arabic world. The works of Hippocrates, Galen, and Ptolemy were preserved entirely from Hebrew sources. The Muslims generally treated their Jewish population well, following the Prophet’s instruction to act indulgently toward their Jewish brothers.

Eventually, the Arabian intellectual heritage began to seep back to the European continent, primarily via the conduits of southern Italy and Spain (where Muslim culture flourished for almost 700 years). While copies of many ancient works ultimately wound their way from the Islamic libraries into the European scriptoria, many more were lost. The Mongol invasions left many of the great Muslim libraries in embers. After the Moors were expelled from Spain in 1492,
the emperor Charles V ordered the burning of all books written in Arabic.

Those texts that survived long enough to resurface in Europe, however, would help seed a new respect for science and a revival of ancient wisdom that would ultimately pave the way for the great philosophical awakening of the European Renaissance.

In Victor Hugo’s
Notre Dame de Paris
, a scholar sits in his study carrel inside the great cathedral, contemplating a strange new artifact that has just landed on his desk: a printed book. Surrounding the new book are piles of old illuminated manuscripts. The scholar walks to a nearby window and gazes out on the silhouette of the great cathedral. “
Ceci tuera cela
,” he says: This will be the end of that.

Just as the advent of alphabetic writing caused massive social disruption across the ancient world, so the new technology of the printing press would transform the social and political worlds of medieval Europe. The Gutenberg revolution would destabilize the old feudal and religious hierarchies of the Middle Ages, enabling a growing class of literate Europeans to reach out to each other in new ways, forging new social bonds that would eventually culminate in the cultural transformations of the Renaissance. While today many of us tend to regard the advent of printing as an unqualified good, its immediate effects were hardly benign. For many Europeans the arrival of this disruptive new technology signaled a bloody road ahead.

By the time Johannes Gutenberg introduced his famous press in 1458, the revolution that would bear his name was already well under way. While the advent of mass printing would accelerate the transfor mation of Europe’s information infrastructure, the seeds of change had already been planted inside medieval monastery walls. To understand the deeper trajectory of the Gutenberg revolution, we need to begin by stepping back a few centuries to the late Middle Ages, when the first glimpses of popular literature were starting to make their way out of the cloisters.

In early medieval England one of the most popular books circulating among the middle and lower classes was a little volume known as the
Physiologus
or
Bestiary
. Consisting of simple verse descriptions of animals, usually accompanied by colored illustrations, the
Bestiary
tried to explain basic points of Christian doctrine in allegorical terms, by presenting them in the guise of a book about animals. By the late twelfth century, it had become the most popular nonbiblical manuscript of its time—indeed, the first such work to reach a wide lay audience. By the early fourteenth century, almost every monastery and church parish owned a copy; schoolchildren learned it by rote in their classrooms. Ever since the first folk taxonomies emerged, human beings have been naming and categorizing animals. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that the
Bestiary
should prove such a runaway best-seller in pre-Gutenberg Europe.