B004R9Q09U EBOK (14 page)

While the books functioned primarily as containers of written words, they also relied heavily on visual symbolism; it was through the power of images that the missionaries could captivate their illiterate audiences and then spellbind them with the ability to decipher the strange codes accompanying the images on the page. The Venerable Bede describes the importance of skillful imagery in the early spread of the Gospel, noting that the effect of pictures was “to the intent that all … even if ignorant of letters, might be able to contemplate … the ever-gracious countenance of Christ and his saints.”
⁵

As the craft of the manuscript progressed, the art of illumination became integral to the form. As a priest visiting Ireland in 1185 put it, “Look more keenly at [the illuminated manuscript] and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art. You will make out intricacies, so delicate and subtle, so exact and compact, so full of knots and links, with colours so fresh and vivid … the more often I see the book, the more carefully I study it, the more I am lost in ever-fresh amazement, and I see more wonders in the book.”
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These books, full as they were of “knots and links,” represented a weaving of written meaning and imagery that would flourish in the age before Gutenberg. Before automated printing ushered in an era of relentlessly textual books, the information architecture of the Dark Ages revolved around the union of word and image.

In the ancient archetype of the monastic scribe, perhaps we can recognize a distant ancestor of today’s multimedia artisans. Like the self-directed artists of the scriptorium, today’s generation of online writers and artists take an unexplored new medium—the Web—into their own hands, fusing words and images, interpolating old texts, and creating whole new forms of expression that, like the illuminated manuscripts of a millennium past, are brimming with vivid colors, knots, and links.

At about the same time that Saint Patrick was escaping his masters in Hibernia, a Roman nobleman named Cassiodorus was engineering
an escape of his own. During the siege of Rome, he had witnessed the destruction of the last great Roman libraries, the Palatine and Ulpian. Although he stayed in Rome during the early years of rebuilding, he felt uneasy about the gathering political might of the church, ultimately deciding to forsake the ravaged city in search of a contemplative life. He abandoned the city and traveled to southern Italy, where his family maintained a country estate at Calabria. There he decided to establish his own little monastery.

The little monastery would eventually tower over the European intellectual landscape, playing a crucial role in preserving the Roman literary heritage and pioneering techniques of book production and library cataloging that would reverberate for more than a thousand years. While other European monasteries already had libraries of their own, Cassiodorus envisioned his scriptorium as more than just a literary archive. He saw it as an active center of scholarship and book production guided by an ethos of spiritual contemplation. He called it the Vivarium, “a place for living things.”

Cassiodorus envisioned the scriptorium not as a musty archive but as an active center of learning, as a place where each monk “may fill his mind with the Scriptures while copying the sayings of the Lord.” He also envisioned the scriptorium as a kind of missionary center, turning out copies of holy texts to be distributed across the growing expanse of Christendom. “What [the monk] writes in his cell will be scattered far and wide over distant Provinces,”
⁷
he wrote. The Vivarium soon became the most prolific center of book production the world had ever seen, churning out copies of works that eventually became canonical texts throughout Europe. Employing a small cadre of literate monks, Cassiodorus initiated a program of copying and translation that would become a template for a scholarly enterprise that flourished in European monasteries well into the Middle Ages.

In contrast to the inventive and sometimes freewheeling Irish scribes, Cassiodorus was a strict literary constructionist, holding his monks to a high standard of exactitude and consistency as they turned out uniform copies of the Gospels and other scriptural works as well as classical Greek and Roman writings. In their quest for efficiency the monks pioneered new techniques of book production, in
troducing efficient new binding techniques and engineering a system for mechanical lighting that enabled them to work on their copying projects well into the night.

Cassiodorus did more than institute an efficient literary assembly line; he also postulated a philosophical framework that attempted to impose a higher order on the whole enterprise. Having fled the authoritative strictures of the church and its hierarchical doctrines, Cassiodorus felt at liberty to propose his own system for classifying the growing body of works now in his charge. In his landmark work,
Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum
(“Foundations of Divine and Secular Literature”), he laid out a sweeping system of thought that proposed a unified organizational scheme for both scriptural and secular texts. Here he proposed a new hierarchy of knowledge, starting with the titular dichotomy between divine and secular works. Within each top-level category, he proposed a mirrored ordering scheme. Believing that the pagan wisdom of the ancients contained seeds of God’s truth, he arranged his books in a bipartite system, juxtaposing the sacred wisdom of the scriptures against the practical knowledge of the ancients. Within the divine realm, the Bible occupied the top spot in the hierarchy, followed by the church fathers, then later and lesser commentaries. On the secular side, Homer occupied the lead position in the literary pecking order, followed by subsequent Greek and Roman poets, orators, dramatists, and historians. The system constituted, as Matthew Battles puts it, “a diptych of mirrored orderings of the divine and the worldly.”
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Just as the ancient Romans had split their collections between Roman and Greek authors, Cassiodorus instituted a bifurcation between Christian and pagan writings that would reverberate for centuries in libraries and scriptoria throughout Western Europe. The system would become the foundation of medieval library catalogs for the next thousand years, serving as the de facto classifying scheme for most monastic libraries. Eventually, even the Vatican adopted Cassiodorus’s scheme.

In addition to establishing a basic subject-level hierarchy, Cassiodorus introduced important innovations at the level of textual
analysis. He established the practice of annotating texts in the marginalia and posited numerous lower-level classification schemes, like the one he devised for categorizing the psalms, which he divided into categories by the holy number of 12:

At its peak, Cassiodorus’s library numbered perhaps 700 books, a far cry from the 700,000 scrolls at Alexandria. But what they lacked in volume they made up for in attention to craft. Given the limited resources of monastic scriptoria and lacking the great aggregating power of the old empire, the focus of libraries shifted away from the brute accumulation of knowledge toward perfecting the craft of reproduction and textual exegesis. The scriptoria were dedicated primarily to the preservation—not the production—of knowledge.

The creation of a codex book required the cooperation of several skilled workers: a skinner, a parchment maker, a beekeeper (for wax tablets), perhaps a painter, a book binder, and of course the ink-stained scribe. Often monasteries would employ illiterate scribes to make copies of texts; they were considered more accurate copyists because they lacked the ability to inject their own ideas into the text.

The monks’ relationship to books was deeply shaped by the oral culture that surrounded them. A page was not a flat slab of data but a
living template for the spoken word and the refracted image. Understanding the medieval mind requires an imaginative leap. “For the monastic reader,” writes critic Ivan Illich, “reading is a much less phantasmagoric and much more carnal activity: the reader understands the lines by moving to their beat, remembers them by recapturing their rhythm, and thinks of them in terms of putting them into his mouth and chewing.”
¹⁰
Indeed, monasteries were sometimes known as houses of mumblers. As Ong puts it, “Manuscript cultures remained largely oral-aural even in retrieval of material preserved in texts.… [R]eaders commonly vocalized, read slowly aloud or
sotto voce
, even when reading alone, and this also helped fix matter in the memory.”
¹¹

 

Drawing of a monastery book cabinet, from a fourteenth-century edition of the
Roman de Troie
by Benoît de Saint-Maure. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, ms. fr. 782, fol. 2v.

 

As the old hierarchies of the Roman empire disintegrated into a period of chaos, new knowledge networks emerged at the hands of self-directed agents like Cassiodorus and the Irish scribes. Rejecting traditional political hierarchies (as personified in the Roman Church), the monastic scribes prized individual intellect as the most reliable vessel of God’s truth, pursuing new pathways and forging new ways of knowing from which new ontological hierarchies would eventually emerge.

Throughout the Dark Ages, the monastic scribes protected countless classical texts and scriptural commentaries, preserving the flame of literacy while most of the continent reverted to the old feudal system. During this period, monastic libraries maintained their own small idiosyncratic collections of books. The monk responsible for tending the books was known as the
armarius
. In many monasteries this monk held a position of high esteem, second only to the abbott. The typical monastic library owned at least one Bible, and most maintained editions of works by major theologians like Augustine and perhaps Jerome. They also collected a flotsam of lesser commentaries, classical poems, lives of the saints, local laws, and assorted popular lore. Books were difficult to come by, and so most of these collections remained small, typically numbering only a handful of volumes, rarely more than a hundred. Given the high costs associated with producing illuminated manuscripts, monasteries valued their books as prized assets. Monks kept detailed records of their holdings with written lists that looked more like an inventory of land holdings than a library catalog. Some of these inventories seem to list books in order of perceived value to the monastery, while others list them in chronological order, and others used organization schemes that remain entirely inscrutable. For example, the library in Würzburg, Germany, maintained a list of 34 books, arranged in a seemingly idiosyncratic order starting with
The Acts of the Apostles
, followed by Gregory the Great’s
Cura Pastoralis
and
Dialogues
, a commentary by Jerome, Bede’s ecclesiastical history, and theological works by Augustine and Ambrose. The list appears to follow a determined logic, but the structure of the catalog remains anyone’s guess.

The forty-eighth chapter of the Rule of Saint Benedict prescribes that each monk should read exactly one book per year, decreeing that “at the forty-day period [of Lent] they each receive a single book from the library, and each shall read the entire book from front to back;
these books shall be given back at the beginning of the [next] Lenten season.”
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Monasteries guarded their collections closely; books were far too valuable for individual monks to own (with the notable exception of the Dominicans, who allowed their friars to keep small personal libraries).

 

Portrait of a scriptorium monk at work, from William Blades,
Pentateuch of Printing with a Chapter on Judges
(1891).