Tenth-century glossed psalter in the British Library
In ten days’ time we leave for a long-scheduled European trip full of both promise and
challenge. The challenge part has to do
with the infirmities of the aging, which have inexplicably become more noticeable
of late. The promise lies in the purpose
of the trip and its various attractive destinations. It will begin with a secular pilgrimage, of
which I am to be the Harry Bailey, to several of the great centers of learning
in southern England. Many American
educational and other cultural institutions are now active in promoting tours
and cruises intended to combine learning and pleasure, and we have been
involved with several in the past. This
one, called “Great Libraries and Literature,” will take us to London, Oxford,
Cambridge, and Canterbury, among other places.
Having spent untold pleasant hours in many of the world’s great
libraries, and having followed the profession of a teacher of literature, I
probably have the superficial qualifications for my assignment.
But they are, truly,
superficial. Only as I have been forced
to think about the matter in something like a comprehensive way, have I
realized just how superficial. I wish we
knew more about the great Library of Alexandria. We know basically two things: it contained a
very large number of scrolls, and the scrolls were burnt to ashes in a disaster
that occurred around the beginning of the common era. It was a museum—i.e.,
an institution dedicated to the Muses, and therefore something at least vaguely
similar to a modern research library.
The Christian world would have to wait a long time to see its like.
Half a century ago a distinguished
British historian, J. H. Plumb, published under the title The Death of the Past a series of essays outlining an argument
concerning the origins of the archive.
Somehow I was quite surprised to discover that the conservation of
documents was so clearly motivated by, well, conservatism. Plumb points out the interesting fact that
nearly all of the world’s earliest surviving written documents—to the extent
that a clay tablet or an inscribed marble qualifies as a “document”—are legal
or legislative attestations of ownership, hierarchy, dynasty, and
dominion. The field beyond the rock pool
belonged to my grandfather. Then it
belonged to my father. Now it belongs to
me. It was the material utility of this
kind of conservative imperative that gives birth to the archive. Plumb further argues that until fairly
recently few historians had serious ambitions of “objectivity”. History often had an agenda similar to that
of other earlier writings.
Religious
conservatism has a somewhat complicated relationship to political conservatism,
but the two have in history been closely, sometimes inextricably, related. We may start with the Bible. The English word derives from a Greek plural
meaning simply books, and the plural
form has its importance. The Bible is a
comprehensive collection of biblical books, which is to say that it is itself a
kind of library in itself. Post-Protestant Americans, when and if they
think of the Bible, are likely to envisage a large, heavy book, probably bound
in black leather. But such mini-libraries
rarely existed before the age of printing.
It is possible that none of the Fathers of the Church—including Jerome,
who translated the whole of the Bible into Latin—ever saw one. In early Christianity, as in antecedent
Judaism—the biblical unit was the individual book or the partial selection of
them.
The word manufactured obviously once meant “made by hand”. Manufactured goods tend to have an economic
value related to three things: the cost of the raw materials of which they are
made, the amount and skill of the handiwork required to make them, and the
social utility or prestige assigned to the finished good. Though the materials used in the manufacture
of early European books varied, the best were made of prepared animal hides, a
relatively expensive commodity. The
labor needed to create a manuscript (literally a “written by hand”) was intensive
and, in a largely illiterate world, so highly skilled as to carry with it a
whiff of the esoteric. Finally the
social value assigned to the Bible on account of its absolute sacral claims was
very high, and encouraged the utmost scrupulosity not merely in the creation of
books but also in their preservation.
One single
book of the Bible was a huge factor in the growth of libraries. I refer to the Psalter—the collection of a
hundred and fifty Hebrew hymns attributed mainly to King David. This book was at the practical center of
Christian monastic life. In the
Benedictine centuries (beginning in the sixth century) thousands of monks in
every nook and cranny of Europe were required to “perform” the Psalter
communally and in its entirety during the course of each week. Nothing so stimulates the creation of a new
book as the example or provocation of an old one. The “monastic library”—from which our modern
warehouses of erudition derive in a fairly straight line—began with the
Psalter. The first examples of recorded vernacular text in almost every language
of Europe are to be found in early psalm-books.
The monoglot children brought into the monasteries as oblates and
novices needed interlinear vernacular glosses to grasp the meaning of the
psalms’ hard Latin words.
As we set
out on our library crawl, we may perhaps wonder whether Karl Marx, sitting day
in, day out, at his hard seat in the British Museum gathering the materials for
works that would inspire a radical, cataclysmic, and continuing assault on the
intellectual and social remnants of Old Europe, might ever have given a thought
to those young Godrics, Bodos, and Jãos, pondering to understand the meaning—either
in lexical or in moral terms--of divitias in Psalm 36 [37]:16, “Better is the little which the righteous has
than the great wealth of the wicked.”
