The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders

by Stuart Kells

Critics have accused book-accumulators of being irrational, peculiar, life’s voyeurs, obsessed with inanimate lovers, the classic cold fish. The Irish-born diplomat Shane Leslie wrote, not very diplomatically, that the book-collector is the hermaphrodite of literature: neither a reader nor a writer.

A dialogue in Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae rails against the accumulation of unread books.

Borromeo had little patience for the veneration of books as physical objects. When a bibliophile showed him a well-printed, well-preserved, and handsomely bound Cicero, the cardinal replied, “I should like it more if it were a little less clean and a little more used.’

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.”

In Ireland and on Scotland’s remote northwest coast, Celtic Christians pioneered a monastic culture that helped keep European art and civilization alive.

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 modeled by Columba of Clonard and Columbanus of Bangor.

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.

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.

In the decade from 820, a separate, two-story 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-story library—a perfect cube—and seems to be a plan for the “ideal monastery,” of which only the library–scriptorium building was actually built.)

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.

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.

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 canonized. Today, she is honored as the patron saint of libraries and bibliophiles.

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 B.C.)—the longest poem in Latin literature.

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.”

Subsequent authors have expressed doubts about the Tuscans’ melodramatic accounts of the book room in Hartmut Tower. One of the men in particular has attracted skepticism. 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.

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.)

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 mitered 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.

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.

There are other reasons to doubt Poggio’s account. The story of the Tuscans’ discoveries has a familiar ring to it. There are many other early descriptions of encounters with books in strange and frightful circumstances.

these stories constitute a hoary genre in which the thoughtful, archetypical book-lover “rescues” manuscripts from misuse and neglect.

Take, for example, the “greatest coup” of Milan’s Ambrosian Library, which, in the seventeenth century, swapped a selection of “more useful” modern books for part of Bobbio’s ancient library. Bobbio at that time owned a magical and priceless collection—including most of those 666 books it had held in the tenth century, one of the very few substantial surviving groups of Italian pre-Caroline manuscripts—and it swapped them for the latest outputs of the printing press.

Antonio Salmazia spent a year in Corfu hunting Greek manuscripts for the library. He succeeded in buying a total of 113 manuscripts there. In today’s interior-design magazines, suppliers advertise old leather-bound books at a price per meter. The manuscripts from Corfu suffered an even ruder slight: being sold by weight.

Boccaccio was escorted to a store of “noble manuscripts” in a doorless loft that was reached by a ladder. Inside, he found books white with dust; books with whole sheets ripped out; books with their margins cut away. A weeping Boccaccio demanded to know how such precious volumes could be so ill-used. A monk told him that whenever his brethren needed money, they would cut out enough parchment leaves from a Bible to make a little psalter, then sell it.

Boccaccio’s visit brings to mind the emptying of the library of the University of Oxford—the predecessor to the Bodleian. In 1550, at the height of the Reformation, all the books in that library, including more than six hundred manuscripts, were sold to bookbinders and other tradesmen for the value of the vellum and parchment.

For the next forty-two years, individual colleges had libraries, but the university itself had none. Thanks to this and other disposals, bibliophiles made wonderful finds in unlikely locations. Sir Robert Cotton was at his tailor’s shop when he saw by chance an ancient document that the tailor was about to cut up and use as a tape measure. On examination, the sheepskin parchment turned out to be an original Magna Carta—one of as few as four that King John had signed in 1215—still with “all its appendages of seals and signatures” attached.

At the age of fourteen, Fernando Columbus—the son of Christopher Columbus and Beatriz Enríquez—had accompanied his father on his fourth voyage across the Atlantic. When “tall, most amiable and very fat” Fernando obtained his maturity, he acquired a fortune in property and slaves that made him one of the richest men in Spain. In 1526 he built a house in Seville on the banks of the Guadalquivir. He planted the garden with American trees, and filled a large room with more than 15,000 books.

Fourteen years after that, the Colombina collection came under the scrutiny of the Inquisition. The Basel 1528 edition of St. Cyril’s Works, edited by the German Protestant Oecolampadius, had most of its second volume and the whole of the third removed. Other books were condemned to total destruction.

The eighteenth century was a time of appalling neglect. Tabares, Colombina’s under-librarian, described how “in his youth he and other children were allowed to play in the room and run their fingers over the illuminated manuscripts and books of prints.”

Tabares helped set things right, but, in the nineteenth century, the losses mounted due to further damage and through theft and secret sales of books. As at 1970, only about 5,500 titles of Fernando Columbus’s bequest survived in the Colombina. Almost 10,000 volumes had been lost.

(On this tour, Clarke and Cripps had first set out from England in May 1799, initially with Malthus—the writer on population—and William Otter—a future bishop of Chichester. Malthus and Otter “soon dropped off.”)

And yet, in the centuries after Poggio’s arrival, other visitors to St. Gall painted a similar picture of neglect. Johann Strümpf, for example, inspected Hartmut Tower in 1548 and found its manuscripts lying “in a disorderly heap.”

An exceptionally early version of the Latin Bible, the Vetus Latina pre-dated St. Jerome’s Vulgate Bible. When later and “better” Bible texts came available, the monks of St. Gall cut their Vetus Latina into strips of parchment and used them as reinforcement in the spines and covers of newer manuscripts.

Priceless artifacts from the era in which Irish and Scottish missionaries helped preserve and renew European Christianity, all fifteen were of worldwide importance for the history of religion, culture, language, and paleography. One of them, for example—the Grammatica Prisciana, c. 845—is today the main source for the philology of Old Irish. How, then, did the monks of St. Gall treat the Irish manuscripts? Out of the fifteen, a total of eleven were cut into fragments.

Starting in 1523, Michelangelo planned and guided the library’s construction under the patronage of the Medici pope Clement VII. The artist’s bold and lively architectural innovations, which create the impression of organic movement, mark out the library as an exemplar of Mannerism.

Michelangelo had to discard the idea of making the stairwell in walnut: the squeaking timber stairs would have distracted the monks. He and Ammannati made do with monumental marble.

Designating the manuscripts and printed works as war booty, the victors took half of them to Zurich and the rest to Berne.

Later in the eighteenth century, St. Gall entered a new golden era, not of book production but of book curatorship and display. The abbot engaged master builders and master craftsmen to construct a perfect home for all the books that had survived the perils of scissor-happy monks; squalid, moldy, wormy confinement in the basement of Hartmut Tower; the rescuing hands of papal secretaries from Tuscany; invasion and war in 926 and 1712; and the fires of 937 and 1418. Construction of the new library commenced in 1758 and lasted a decade.

Executed in an illusionistic, trompe l’oeil style called quadratura (popularized in the seventeenth century by Jesuit monk Andrea Pozzo), the ceiling creates an illusion of bookcases extending upwards into the heavens.