The Library

by Stuart Kells

  Edward Gibbon, commenting on the worldly achievements of the third-century Roman emperor Gordian the Younger, noted approvingly:

  Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes attested the variety of his inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that both the one and the other were designed for use rather than for ostentation.

  The eighteenth-century English barrister Thomas Rawlinson was lampooned as a learned idiot who accumulated a large collection of books, then read little more than their title pages. He was said to have gathered books ‘much as a squirrel gathers nuts’. After Rawlinson lost money in the South Sea Bubble, his books were dispersed—in sixteen auctions between 1722 and 1734—and other collectors gathered up his nuts with relish.

  Unsympathetic portraits of book-lovers picture them as oddballs and outcasts, fussing over gaps, misalignments and asymmetries in their private libraries. Tim Munby sided with the bibliomaniacs. ‘To be thought a lunatic by one’s fellow men…is an insignificant price to pay for a lifetime’s enjoyment.’ So did Walter Bagehot:

  In early days there is an opinion that the obvious thing to do with a horse is to ride it; with a cake, to eat it; with a sixpence, to spend it. A few boyish persons carry this further, and think that the natural thing to do with a book is to read it. The mere reading of a rare book is a puerility, an idiosyncrasy of adolescence.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘A damned sewerful of men’

  Renaissance rediscoveries

  In the depths of the Dark Ages, Western Europe was scarred by war and imperial collapse. There was, however, an unlikely patch of cultural light. In Ireland and on Scotland’s remote northwest coast, Celtic Christians pioneered a monastic culture that helped keep European art and civilisation alive. In the sixth and seventh centuries a vanguard of Irish and Scottish missionaries (the Hiberno–Scottish Mission) set out from Iona and other refuges, crossing to the Continent, where they founded some of Europe’s most important monasteries—and libraries. Wherever they appeared, the missionaries brought manuscripts and an extraordinary zeal. In France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, at Disibodenberg, Besançon, Lure, Cusance, Langres, Toul, Liège, Péronne, Ebersmünster, Cologne, Regensburg, Vienna, Erfurt, Würzburg, Annegray and Fontaine-lès-Luxeuil, communities adopted the way of life modelled by Columba of Clonard and Columbanus of Bangor. In a richly symbolic development, the monastery at Annegray was established in an abandoned Roman fortress.

  Fast-forward to the fourteenth century and the Catholic church was again in trouble. Between 1378 and 1417, first two and then three concurrent popes claimed authority over western Christendom. Each contender maintained his own Sacred College of Cardinals, and his own administrators and offices. The causes of the split were political rather than theological. The followers of the rival popes were divided, in large part, along geographical lines. Naturally, the spectacle of the Great Schism seriously eroded the prestige of the church and the papacy.

  In 1414 a general council of the church convened in Constance with a view to mending the schism. The council was a logistical exercise with few precedents. Apart from 30,000 horses and 700 prostitutes plus scores of jugglers, more than 20,000 cardinals, abbots, monks, friars and priests converged on the Swiss town. The council lasted four and a half years, and ultimately succeeded in obtaining the resignation of the Roman pope, Gregory XII, dismissing the Avignon pope, Benedict XIII, neutralising the Pisan pope, John XXIII, and, in November 1417, electing Martin V as the sole pope.

  In the summer of 1416, three Tuscan secretaries—Cencio Rustici, Bartolomeo da Montepulciano and Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini—took a break from their work at the general council. Hearing rumours that a nearby monastery guarded an ancient library, they set out on the thirty-kilometre journey to St Gall (now St Gallen).

  The monastery’s roots traced back to the same vanguard of Irish missionaries who’d founded Bobbio in Lombardy. Early in the seventh century, Colombanus of Bangor (also known as Columban the Younger) had led his missionaries across Europe. When the party reached mountainous country near Brigantia on Lake Constance, a monk named Gallus tripped over. Taking this as a sign, it was said, he set up a hermit cell. By chance or design, he’d stumbled at a beautiful spot: near the waterfall in the wooded valley of the River Steinach, in the Forest of Arbon. Residing in an austerely appointed hermitage, Gallus kept a small library of liturgical works for use in daily worship. The cell and its hermit became well known in the local area. People went to Gallus for instruction and protection. A prayer house was built, more monks came, and soon the hermitage had grown into a monastery.

  A century after Gallus broke march by the waterfall, a priest named Otmar built an abbey on the site and became the first abbot of the monastery of St Gall. Under their second abbot, in 747, the monks joined the Benedictine order. A series of astute and diligent successor abbots—Waldo (782–84), Gozbert (816–36), Grimald (841–72), Hartmut (872–83) and Salomo III (890–920)—built St Gall into an important religious centre.

  Books were pivotal to Benedictine monastic practice. St Benedict’s precepts mandated daily readings. Also, at Lent, every monk had to read the Holy Scriptures solo, from cover to cover. All this reading required Bibles. St Gall’s scriptorium dates from no later than 760, early in the monastery’s history. Apart from bibles, the first scribes at St Gall produced commentaries, hagiographies and grammars. After overseeing growth in the monastery’s library, Abbot Waldo moved to Reichenau Abbey in southern Germany where he founded a great library. (He was abbot at Reichenau from 786 to 806.) Under Waldo, St Gall’s scribes had made do with parchment that was, according to Anthony Hobson, ‘dirty yellow in colour and full of tears and holes’. Under Gozbert, however, high-quality white vellum became available. Thus equipped, as many as 100 scribes set to work enlarging the monastery’s inventory of books. In the decade from 820, a separate, two-storey library building was constructed—scriptorium below, book collection above—the first of its kind in Europe. (Preserved in the abbey library is the oldest extant plan of a monastery. Dating from the early decades of the ninth century, it shows a large, two-storey library—a perfect cube—and seems to be a plan for the ‘ideal monastery’, of which only the library–scriptorium building was actually built.)

  In the new scriptorium, the art of illuminated initials flourished. St Gall’s distinctive style blended Irish, English, German, Latinate and Byzantine elements—to beautiful effect. Apart from producing their own manuscripts, St Gall’s monks also swapped them with books produced elsewhere, and received books through bequests and commerce. Most of the books, though, were made on-site by talented monks such as Notker the German and Notker the Stammerer.

  A catalogue written sometime after 850 and before 890 recorded, in the main library, 294 volumes containing 426 texts; some texts were bound together. The monastery also boasted a scholar’s library, a church library and the abbot’s private library. St Gall was a place of books. The first history of the abbey appeared in 890. Written by the monk Ratpert, it was called ‘The Vicissitudes of the Abbey of St Gall’. Many vicissitudes would follow.

  Late in the ninth century, the monks moved their books to a fortified building, adjoining the church, called Hartmut Tower—named after the recently deceased abbot. In the tenth century, ahead of an imminent Hungarian invasion, a devout, prescient recluse named Wiborada advised the monks to move the library to an even safer place: the island of Reichenau on Lake Constance. When the invaders came, the monks sought refuge in a nearby fortress, but Wiborada remained in her recluse’s cell at the church of St Magnus. Killed by the intruders at the beginning of May, 926, she became in 1047 the first woman in the history of the church to be canonised. Today, she is honoured as the patron saint of libraries and bibliophiles.

  After surviving the 937 fire that destroyed much of the abbey, St Gall’s library entered a long period of stasis. From the eleventh century until the Renaissance,
additions to the library ‘amounted to little beyond a handful of legal books and a few works by Bernard, Anselm and later authors’. In the year 1200 or thereabouts, the scriptorium was shut altogether. Two centuries later, the abbey and town of St Gall became an independent principality, the abbot a prince of the Holy Roman Empire.

  The library, though, remained a prize. In 1416, as soon as the three Tuscan secretaries arrived, they found wonderful treasures. A complete copy of Quintilian’s Institutiones oratoriae, a treatise on the theory and practice of rhetoric—a book the Tuscans had hitherto known only in a very imperfect form. They also found Silius Italicus’s Punica, a seventeen-book, 12,000-line saga on the Second Punic War (which was fought from 218 to 201 BC)—the longest poem in Latin literature. Plus two historical and legal commentaries by Asconius Pedianus on Cicero’s speeches. And, dedicated to Vespasian and written by Valerius Flaccus ‘in shimmering and powerful verse falling not far short of poetic majesty’, the epic poem Argonautica—a ‘free re-handling’ of the story, already told by Apollonius of Rhodes, of the quest for the golden fleece.

  An amazed Cencio Rustici wrote to Francesco da Fiano, gushing about these and other marvels at St Gall: by Vitruvius, On Architecture, the most important ancient work on that subject; by the grammarian Priscianus (who flourished around the year 500), a schoolbook commentary on Virgil’s poetry. And by Lactantius, a book ‘small in size but prodigious in the quality of its eloquence and wisdom’, in which the author, writing on the creation of mankind, ‘plainly refutes the reasoning of those who have declared the human condition to be lower and more wretched than that of the beasts’. The volume was probably Lactantius’s De officio hominis.

  Several of the works and their authors were largely or entirely unknown in Italy. Poggio Bracciolini remarked of Quintilian, for example, ‘among us in Italy, he had been so mutilated, so mangled, ravaged, no doubt, in the toils of time, that it was impossible to recognize in him his form or his nature’. Only one half of Quintilian’s Institutiones oratoriae was known in Italy, and that half was ‘in a very mutilated state’. The rediscovery at St Gall of Quintilian and other Roman authors would reverberate far and wide. And the discoveries kept coming. When Cencio Rustici found a papyrus manuscript by Isidore of Seville, he took it in his arms and hugged it, ‘on account of its holy and incorrupt antiquity’. The magical experience of encountering impossibly old and rare books filled the men with joy.

  But the men’s joy soon turned to sadness and anger at the abbot, Heinrich von Gundelfingen. In Hartmut Tower, as reported by Poggio and Rustici, the Tuscans found ‘innumerable books’ in wretched condition. Rustici recorded how the men ‘broke out in tears’ when they saw ‘the unsurpassed glory and honour of the Latin language’

  debased and defiled by dust, worms, dirt and all other things pertaining to the destruction of books…Surely if this library were able to speak for itself, it would shout: ‘Lovers of the Latin language, do not allow me to be annihilated by this awful neglect: rescue me from this prison, whose darkness even the light of learning cannot illumine.’ The abbot and monks who dwelled in that monastery were completely illiterate. What barbarous foes of the Latin language, what a damned sewerful of men!

  In a letter to Guarino Guarini of Verona, Poggio described how the books were filthy with mould and dust.

  For these books were not in the library, as befitted their worth, but in a sort of foul and gloomy dungeon at the bottom of one of the towers, where not even men convicted of a capital offence would have been stuck away.

  Vividly, Poggio imagined how the cultivated, elegant, conscientious, humorous Quintilian volume must have suffered in ‘the foulness of that prison, the filth of that hole, the savagery of the guards’.

  Dejected, dressed in tatters as though in mourning, with unkempt beard, hair matted with dirt, he seemed by his face and bearing to declare that he had been sentenced to an unjust execution. He seemed to reach out, to implore the citizens of Rome to protect him from unfair judgement, to rage and complain that he who had once by his support and eloquence defended many, now could find neither patron to take pity on his misfortune nor anyone at all to look out for his welfare or save him from being subjected to an unjust punishment.

  Subsequent authors have expressed doubts about the Tuscans’ melodramatic accounts of the bookroom in Hartmut Tower. One of the men in particular has attracted scepticism. Poggio would later be styled ‘the greatest book hunter of the Renaissance’, the prototype ‘bird dog’ collector. Perhaps the man who relished finding and taking away old books had overstated the monastic disarray as a cover and a justification for making off with some of the abbey’s choicest volumes. In the course of his work, Poggio certainly did not remain squeaky clean. He demonstrated a knack for talking himself into monasteries; at least once he exaggerated his credentials and achievements as a book finder. Ever ready to accuse others of lying, cowardice, theft, hypocrisy, heresy and perversion, he himself was labelled a cheat, and was not above using underhanded means to obtain books from monasteries. He bribed a monk, for example, in an attempt to remove a Livy and an Ammianus from the library of Hersfeld Abbey.

  While working as a papal official, Poggio fathered fourteen children with his mistress, Lucia Pannelli. At the age of fifty-six he married seventeen-year-old Selvaggia de’Buondelmonti, with whom he produced a further six children. (In 1436 he penned a famous dialogue, On Marriage in Old Age.) Over the span of a varied and colourful career, Poggio, like Shakespeare, used his wits to amass a substantial fortune. After selling a Livy manuscript in 1434, he used the proceeds to build a villa in the Valdarno, which he filled with coins, inscriptions and antique busts. Also like Shakespeare, Poggio improved his apparent standing by purchasing a bogus coat of arms. (A silver-gilt reliquary bust, in the form of a mitred bishop and bearing the arms of Poggio and Selvaggia, is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

  And then there is the small matter of the Facetiae, the fifteenth century’s most scandalous book of rude jokes. Poggio wrote the Facetiae between 1438 and 1452. Some of the jokes are about church politics and current affairs. Most are about sex. Jokes about lusty parishioners, lecherous merchants, magical orifices, gullible patients, lewd factotums, randy hermits (St Gallus must have turned in his grave), simple-minded grooms, libidinous peasants, seductive friars—and the woman who tells her husband she has two vaginas (duos cunnos), one in front that she would share with him; the other behind—for the Church. Building on this theme, Poggio’s joke number CLXXXI is an ‘Amusing remark by a young woman in labour’.

  In Florence, a young woman, somewhat of a simpleton, is on the point of giving birth. She has long endured acute pain, and the midwife, candle in hand, inspects secretiora ejus, in order to ascertain if the baby is coming: ‘Look also on the other side,’ the poor creature says. ‘My husband has sometimes taken that road.’

  Joke number CLXI presents a new theory about personal destiny.

  A quack doctor claims he can produce children of different types—merchants, soldiers, generals—depending on how far his member penetrates. A foolish rustic, hoping for a soldier, hands his wife over to the scoundrel, but then, thinking himself sly, springs from his hiding place and hits the quack’s backside to push his member further in. ‘Per Sancta Dei Evangelia,’ the rustic shouts triumphantly, ‘hic erit Papa!’ ‘This one will be Pope!’

  CLIV is about ‘A mountaineer who thought of marrying a girl’.

  A mountaineer from the village of Pergola is inclined to marry the quite youthful daughter of one of his neighbours. But, after close inspection, he finds her too young and delicate, and refuses. ‘She is riper than you think,’ the ignorant father says. ‘She has already had three children by the Vicar’s clerk.’

  Though frowned upon by the church for obvious reasons, manuscripts and printed editions of the book were so popular, ‘they flooded all Italy and overflowed into France, Spain, Germany, England and every other country where Latin was understood’. Leonardo da
Vinci owned a copy, as did J. P. Morgan four centuries later.

  Apart from complicating his reputation by authoring the Facetiae, Poggio also attracted a certain amount of guilt by association. He was at the general council in his capacity as secretary to Baldassare Cossa, better known as Pope John XXIII, or the Anti-Pope. One of the three papal contenders, John had in fact initiated the general council; he did so under pressure from Sigismund, the Holy Roman Emperor. But, once the council was underway, things went badly for him. So badly that he was forced to flee Constance under the cover of darkness, dressed as a postman and flanked by a loyal crossbowman. During his absence he was formally charged with incest, rape, sodomy, simony, piracy, immorality, torture, murder, ambition, schism, tyranny, ‘bad conduct’ and heresy—the latter through denying the reality of the resurrection. Tried in absentia, he was found guilty on all counts. According to Edward Gibbon, though, ‘The most scandalous charges were suppressed; the vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, rape, sodomy, murder and incest.’ He spent a few months as Sigismund’s prisoner before buying his way out by paying a large ransom. He made amends with the new pope, who absolved him and named him cardinal bishop. A few months later, he died.