A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books Read online

  During his years at court, de Bury served variously as cofferer to the king, treasurer of the wardrobe, clerk of the privy seal, papal emissary, royal ambassador, and lord chancellor of the realm. As a powerful member of the inner circle, he had no qualms about using his influence for the things he wanted, and he was disarmingly candid about what pleased him. In the final year of his life, the bishop took quill to parchment and declared in crude but serviceable Latin his devotion to the “sacred vessels of wisdom” that he had always found so enriching. Writing in his ecclesiastical manor known as Auckland, de Bury combined the Greek words for “love” and “books” to create the title of his twenty-three-chapter paean, Philobiblon; the work is not only a study in superlatives, but the confession of a hopelessly intoxicated spirit.

  “Ye are the tree of life and the fourfold stream of Paradise, by which the human mind is fed and the arid intellect is moistened and watered,” de Bury proclaimed.

  Ye are the ark of Noah and the ladder of Jacob, and the troughs in which the young of those that look therein are changed in colour. Ye are the stones of testimony, the pitchers that hold the lamps of Gideon, and the scrip of David, from which the smooth stones are taken for slaying Goliath. Ye are the golden vessels of the temple, and the arms of the soldiery of the Church, by which the darts of the most Wicked One are quenched. Ye are fruitful olives, vineyards of Engadi, fig-trees that know not barrenness, burning lamps ever to be held forth in the hand; yea, all the best of Scripture could we adapt to books did it please us to speak in figures.

  De Bury described the brazen collecting techniques he came to employ—all made possible, he freely admitted, after he had attained “the notice of the King’s Majesty.” Along with this stroke of good fortune and high position came the power to “notably advance or hinder, promote or obstruct both the great or the small.” Though he always was “delighted to hold friendly communion with men of letters and lovers of books,” his newfound influence afforded “a large opportunity of visiting wheresoever we would, and of hunting, as it were, through certain very choice preserves, to wit, the private and public libraries, both of the regulars and the seculars.”

  He told how “the f lying rumour of our love for books now spread everywhere,” and how “we were reported to be even languishing from our desire for them, chiefly for ancient books, and … any one could easier obtain our favour by quartos than by money.” Soon, there “f lowed to us in place of pledges and presents, in place of gifts or prizes, bleared quartos and decrepit books, precious alike in our sight and our affection.” The bishop insisted that “justice suffered no harm” by this manipulation of the court’s business, yet he admitted that if he had “loved gold and silver cups, spirited horses, or no small sums of money,” he could easily have “stored up a rich treasure” for himself. “But, indeed, we preferred books to pounds, and loved parchments more than florins, and cared more for lean pamphlets than fat palfreys.”

  Of all his travels, de Bury cherished his trips to Paris, “the paradise of the world,” where he could “open out our treasures and loosen out our purse strings” and acquire “priceless books” for little more than “dirt and sand.” During one visit to Italy, he spent five thousand marks; in Rome he bought texts and manuscripts at a time when rare documents had become valuable commodities to be sold on the open market. Appalled by the steady loss of such material, Petrarch rebuked his countrymen: “Are you not ashamed that the wrecks of your ancient grandeur, spared by the inundation of the barbarians, are daily sold by your miscalculating avarice to foreigners?”

  Petrarch and de Bury are known to have met at least once, yet the bishop continued collecting without interruption. Mendicant friars working abroad were more than willing to act as scouts and agents for his cause, an arrangement that gave him a decided edge over the competition. “What leveret could miss the sight of so many keen-eyed hunters? What fry could escape now their hooks and now their nets and snares?”

  Soon the chests of the noblest monasteries were opened; cases were brought forth, and caskets were unlocked, and volumes that had slumbered long ages in their tombs awakened astonished and those that had lain hidden in places of darkness were overwhelmed with rays of new light. Books once most dainty, but now become corrupted and disgusting, strewn over with the litters of mice and bored with the gnawings of worms, were lying about almost lifeless; and those that once were clothed in purple and fine linen, now prostrate in sackcloth and in ashes seemed given over to oblivion as habitations of moths.

  By means of these methods, the bishop was able to locate “the object and the incitement of our love,” and these “vessels of sacred wisdom came into the control of our stewardship, some by gift, others by sale, and some by loan for a time.” Items de Bury could not buy, borrow, or cajole into his collection he had reproduced “in our different manors,” where he employed “no small multitude of antiquaries, copyists, correctors, binders, illuminators, and, in general, all of those who could serviceably labour over books.”

  By all accounts, Richard de Bury was a thoroughly decent person who routinely gave money and food to the poor. Committed to peace, he argued unsuccessfully against the king’s aggressive adventures in France. “He was a man of his age, but better than his age,” Andrew Fleming West observed in the notes to his 1889 translation of Philobiblon. “Without rising to the level of greatness, he is far above the commonplace.” In addition to his principal library at Auckland, de Bury maintained several others and is usually described as always being surrounded by books. Visitors could not walk in any room without tripping over scattered volumes.

  A key word in de Bury’s vocabulary was stewardship; though he acquired with gusto and pleasure, he understood that in the grand scheme he was only a custodian. In the nineteenth chapter of Philobiblon, he stipulated that his books should go to Oxford University and that students could use them at no cost. He further directed that duplicate copies could be removed from the premises provided a pledge was left as security. Transcriptions were to be allowed, but they had to be made inside the building; a register was to be kept and a yearly inventory to be conducted.

  There is no doubt regarding de Bury’s intentions, but scholars disagree on whether or not any of his books ever reached Oxford. He left no money, and there is evidence that some volumes were sold to pay outstanding debts upon his death. Because of these questions, Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester (1391–1447), the youngest son of Henry IV and the first English layman to achieve lasting fame as a bibliophile, is credited with giving the university its first books. But de Bury’s collection would not have survived much longer than two hundred years regardless of where it went. Only two of his books are known to have passed safely to the present century; the rest were lost in a cultural holocaust that victimized every ecclesiastical library in Britain—including the one at Oxford. It all had to do with Henry VIII’s divorce.

  Since the sixth century, libraries in Britain had been the exclusive concern of the Roman Catholic Church, a tradition that began in 596 when Pope Gregory the Great commissioned a Benedictine monk to carry Christianity across the Channel. After establishing his headquarters at Canterbury, the papal envoy, later to be canonized as Saint Augustine, deposited nine religious volumes in the new abbey to form what tradition holds to have been the island’s first formal repository. As other monasteries opened, theological materials were augmented by historic chronicles and literary works. By the twelfth century, a lay book trade was in operation throughout much of the English realm, and a community of parchmenters, scribes, and illuminators flourished in Oxford. When Erasmus visited England in 1497, he wrote home in awe of what he saw: “It is incredible what a treasure of old books is found here far and wide. There is so much erudition, not of a vulgar and ordinary kind, but recondite, accurate, ancient, both Latin and Greek, that you would not seek anything in Italy, but pleasure of traveling.”

  In 1533, to legitimize his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn, Henry VI
II defied the Roman Catholic pope and established the Church of England, with himself at its head. He claimed authority over all clergy in England. The following year, four Carthusian monks and two priests were accused of refusing to accept the king as their holy leader; carted through London in their priestly robes and habits, the six men were hanged, drawn, and quartered in a public square. Henry raised the stakes even further by ordering the execution of John Cardinal Fisher, the bishop of Rochester and the founder of a small library at Cambridge. He then set his agents loose on the symbols of the Catholic faith. Ancient abbeys throughout the realm were ransacked and emptied, dismantled and destroyed. Roofs were torn down and stained-glass windows smashed so the lead could be extracted. The graceful spires of Glastonbury, an exquisite example of English Gothic design, were reduced to rubble and used as fill for a common causeway through the marshes. “Except for such altar-books as had bindings of precious metals or jewels, the monastic libraries were scattered unregarded,” Arundell Esdaile wrote in his history of the British Library.

  The same year that he severed ties with the Vatican, Henry authorized an inventory of historic properties under his control. John Leland, keeper of the king’s library, was appointed king’s antiquary to make what was later celebrated as a “laboryouse journey” in search of England’s antiquities. His responsibilities included locating old buildings, manuscripts, and coins, preparing detailed descriptions of topographical features, and identifying the remains of Roman, Saxon, and Danish civilizations. On July 16, 1536—the year of the great suppression of the monasteries— Leland wrote a letter entreating the commissioners of enquiry to take the best books in the monasteries for the king’s library. After seven or eight years of arduous research, Leland is said to have taken leave of his senses, and he never completed the assignment. His findings were published posthumously, however, and are regarded as the first bibliographical account to be produced in England.

  John Bale, a strident advocate of the Reformation and author of many Protestant polemics, openly deplored the mindless destruction of books and manuscripts. In a letter addressed to King Edward VI in 1549, he wrote that in turning over the “superstitious monasteries” to the Crown, “little respect was had to their Libraries, for the safeguard of those noble and precious monuments.” He cited instances where a “great number” of people had used books “to scour their candlesticks, and some to rub their boots; some they sold to the grocers and soap-sellers, and some they sent over seas to the bookbinders, not in small number but at times whole ships full, to the wondering of the foreign nations.” Indeed, Bale wondered how seriously England’s reputation had been sullied by the desolation. “Yea, what may bring our realm to more shame and rebuke than to have it noised abroad that we are despisers of learning? I judge this to be true, and utter it with heaviness—that neither the Britons under the Romans and Saxons, nor yet the English people under the Danes and Normans, had ever seen such damage of their learned monuments as we have seen in our times.”

  A modest program of preservation was undertaken by Matthew Parker (1504–1575), the second Anglican archbishop of Canterbury and a scholar of some distinction who edited works by the chroniclers Aelfric, Gildas, Asser; Matthew Paris; Walsingham; and the Welsh historian Giraldus Cambrensis. Parker maintained a skilled corps of printers, transcribers, and engravers, and his 1572 treatise, De Antiquitate Britannicae Ecclesiae, is believed to be the first privately printed English book. A man of controversial views, Parker gathered a pertinent archive of 433 manuscripts, which he bequeathed to Corpus Christi College at Cambridge, where he once had been master.

  Possibly England’s greatest debt in this period is owed Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631), an ardent antiquarian who cared deeply for the welfare of documentary materials simply because they were irreplaceable, not for any political or theological positions they may have supported. His book collection, the Cottonian Library, became one of two major components of the British Museum (later the British Library). A visit to the main exhibition room in the British Library in London offers dramatic evidence of his contribution.

  Around the perimeter of the ornate hall, in two imposing tiers, is the majestic library of King George III, a monarch maligned for losing the North American colonies to bands of resourceful rebels, but justly celebrated for his spirited gathering of great books and the access he enthusiastically gave to scholars like Samuel Johnson to use them. In the central gallery are display case after display case of national treasures, many containing the manuscripts of such luminaries as John Keats, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot; others feature the principal printed editions of Virginia Woolf, Edward Gibbon, and Jane Austen. Amid these inspiring examples of creative genius and artistic imagination, pride of place is given to the contents of a single case designated “English Literature 1.” Inside, the single surviving source of Beowulf, England’s great epic poem, lies open at a passage describing the funeral of the Danish king Scyld Scefing. The manuscript is believed to have been copied about A.D. 1000, some three or four hundred years after it was composed by an unknown Anglo-Saxon writer of considerable narrative talent. According to the description card, this most celebrated work of English medieval literature “is known only from this copy.” At the bottom is this designation: “Cotton MS Vitellius A. xv.”

  Robert Cotton’s library in Westminster contained fourteen small “presses,” or bookcases, and each was capped by the bust of a different Roman emperor or empress. Thus, a manuscript that carries a Caligula “extension,” or designation, means it was shelved in the Caligula press, and so on for Augustus, Julius, Tiberius, Nero, Cleopatra, Galba, Faustina, Titus, Ortho, Claudius, Vespasian, Vitellius, and Domitian. Called the emperor system, the imperial pressmarks have been retained for more than three hundred years in honor of this unique collection.

  In the same case with Beowulf is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a chivalric poem that was “copied about 1400” and owes its survival to “the present unique text.” Its code is “Cotton MS Nero A. x, ff.94b-95.” Another item on view in this case is The Vision of Piers Plowman, written between 1390 and 1400 by William Langford. “Virtually all that is known of Langford is to be gleaned” from this poem, which is designated “Cotton MS Vespasian B. xvi.” Five of the nine objects on display here begin with the Cotton designation. In another case nearby is a seventh- century folio on vellum with breathtaking illuminations known as the Lindisfarne Gospels. “The supreme masterpiece of early Anglo- Saxon translation is itself of great importance as the earliest surviving version of the Gospels in any form of the English language.” Its designation: “Cotton MS Nero D. iv.”

  Robert Bruce Cotton was the eldest son of a Huntingtonshire gentleman whose family, paradoxically, profited from the dissolution of the monasteries. At Westminster School he became the protégé of William Camden, author of Britannia, the first English historical work to embrace the emerging tenets of Renaissance scholarship and one of the most popular books of its time. Camden’s technique was to tour the kingdom and conduct primary research in the field, a pioneering approach that greatly influenced his young student. At the age of sixteen, Cotton was a founder of the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries. From Westminster he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, and by the time he entered the Middle Temple in 1588 he had committed himself to gathering the chronicles, records, charters, and artifacts that documented his country’s history.

  Precisely how Cotton acquired all of his manuscripts over the next thirty years is not known in detail, though a number of contemporary records do offer some tantalizing clues. Drawing on exhaustive examination of correspondence, manuscript catalogues, book inscriptions, lists of lent material, and records of gifts, Kevin Sharpe, an English historian, constructed a revealing profile of Cotton’s collecting habits. “He seems to have persuaded acquaintances and friends going abroad to keep one eye open for precious manuscripts” as well, Sharpe wrote. By 1599 his collection was so rich that he already was lending books to other Society of Antiq
uaries members.

  Of four original copies of the Magna Carta, Cotton was able to acquire two. The Samaritan Pentateuch came to him as a gift from Archbishop James Ussher. At court, he met noblemen who traveled frequently through Europe, and he also engaged the assistance of highly placed diplomats to find material for him. European scholars furnished him with manuscripts, and he was always alert to other private libraries that might suddenly be available. The seventeenth-century antiquarian John Aubrey wrote that after the astrologer Dr. John Dee died, either in 1608 or 1609, Cotton bought a piece of property on a hunch that he had buried a cache of books on magic and “spirits.” While the story lacks documentation, it has burnished Cotton’s reputation as a collector who would do anything to rescue artifacts.

  How much money Cotton may have spent on books is not known, though there is speculation that he spared no expense. A grandson complained that the ancestral estate had been drained to buy manuscripts, while a brother-in-law sarcastically noted that the great library had been “chargeably brought together.” As a wealthy property owner, Cotton did have the means to underwrite his obsession. One of his lists was headed “Divers Manuscripts as I am promised to have gotten for me this 30 April 1621,” and another, “Books I want.” In 1603, the year Queen Elizabeth died, Cotton was knighted by her successor, King James I, and he used his influence at court to acquire more material.

  During the late 1590s and early 1600s, Cotton lived in the Blackfriars section of London in the home of his first patron, Lord Hunsdon. There he established close connections with the leading literary and theatrical figures of the day—men such as the dramatist Thomas Nashe and the poet Samuel Daniel. Ben Jonson is known to have consulted Cotton’s library regularly for background information he needed for his royal masques, and William Burton received extensive help for a regional history he was preparing. Many of the writers who used his library acknowledged their debt to him in print, including Richard Knolles, a historian and author of The Generall Historie of the Turkes, and Thomas Milles, in Catalogue of Honour. With Cotton’s assistance, Sir Walter Raleigh wrote his Historie of the World while confined to the Tower on charges of treason; Sir Francis Bacon consulted Cotton while working on The History of Henry VII.