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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
  • Cited by 5
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
March 2012
Print publication year:
2011
Online ISBN:
9780511978029
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521583459
Subjects:
Literature, Printing and Publishing History, Anglo Saxon and Medieval Literature
Series:
The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain
Collection:
Cambridge Histories - Literature
Information

Book description

This is the first comprehensive survey of the history of the book in Britain from Roman through Anglo-Saxon to early Norman times. The expert contributions explore the physical form of books, including their codicology, script and decoration; examine the circulation and exchange of manuscripts and texts between England, Ireland, the Celtic realms and the Continent; discuss the production, presentation and use of different classes of texts, ranging from fine service books to functional schoolbooks; and evaluate the libraries that can be associated with particular individuals and institutions. The result is an authoritative account of the first millennium of the history of books, manuscript-making and literary culture in Britain which, intimately linked to its cultural contexts, sheds vital light on broader patterns of political, ecclesiastical and cultural history extending from the period of the Vindolanda writing tablets through the age of Bede and Alcuin to the time of the Domesday Book.

Reviews

'… the essays achieve an admirable balance between the big picture and the telling details … this collection of texts is useful and stimulating for a wide readership, and a valuable introduction to the seven-volume Cambridge series …'

Source: The Times Literary Supplement

'The range of topics discussed and the scholarship involved make this the best one-volume guide we have to a field which has been expanding at a rapid rate throughout the last century.'

Source: Contemporary Review

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • PART IV - COLLECTIONS OF BOOKS
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Two authentic works have survived to the modern era, an Epistola ad milites Corotici, and a Confessio in which Patrick explains himself to those whom he had converted in Ireland. As Patrick contrasts the behaviour of Coroticus with that of Romano-Gaulish Christians dealing with pagan Franks, his mission probably preceded the conversion of the Franks, perhaps in 496. He composed in cursus rhythms which, like his biblical orthography, diction and syntax, are faultless. His prose, arranged per cola et commata, by clauses and phrases, exhibits varied forms of complex word play. The Synodus Episcoporum or First Synod of St Patrick, is extant in a single manuscript copied from an Insular exemplar and written at the end of the ninth century or the beginning of the tenth in a scriptorium under the influence of Tours. Patrick's works remain the oldest extant literary texts written by a native of these islands, in these islands, for inhabitants of these islands.
  • 28 - The library of Iona at the time of Adomnán
    pp 570-579
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Since no library list from Iona has survived, and the only extant manuscript that can be linked with certainty to the island is a copy of the Vita sancti Columbae, it is on the basis of the texts quoted in Adomnán's two books that one can reconstruct the contents of the island's library. The Vita Germani by Constantius can be identified from the Vita Columbae, along with the anonymous Actus Silvestri. Incidentally, through Bede's words of praise for the learning displayed in the De locis sanctis, Adomnán himself was included in the later updates of the De viris inlustribus. One other piece of textual evidence that is relevant to Iona's library appears in the seventh-century Irish poem Amra Choluimb Chille in praise of Columba. Much speculation has been devoted to the form of the biblical text on Iona which, in turn, has focused on the presence of non-Vulgate lemmata in Adomnán's works.
  • 29 - Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England
    pp 580-590
  • View abstract

    Summary

    There were two languages in extensive use for writing and reading in Anglo-Saxon England: Latin and English. It is convenient to distinguish between literacy in Latin and literacy in English. At the time of the conversion, Latin was an entirely foreign language to the English, who had had relatively little contact with the Roman Empire or with Latin-speaking Britons. Competence and indeed skill in reading and writing Latin came remarkably quickly to the English after conversion. Within seventy years Aldhelm was composing highly sophisticated Latin verse and prose. Ælfric's vernacular works are explicitly addressed to the laity or the secular clergy, while his Latin writings are for monks. Byrhtferth of Ramsey makes the distinction explicit in his Enchiridion. The production of documents in the vernacular seems to have begun very soon after the conversion. From King Alfred's time onwards the vernacular is in regular use for books of Bible translations, homilies, saints' lives, history, computus, medicine and much else.
  • 30 - Aldhelm’s library
    pp 591-605
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The evidence of the Leiden Glossary, which shares with Aldhelm a detailed knowledge of the works of Rufinus, specifically of the Historia ecclesiastica. It has been argued that Aldhelm may have been fostered with the Northumbrian royal family, and at that period may have been educated by Adomnán in Iona. Elsewhere in the composite text of the Epistola ad Acircium Aldhelm gestures towards a strikingly eclectic selection of authors. By contrast, for example, almost all of the echoes of Paulinus of Nola or Alcimus Avitus detected to date come in the later Carmende virginitate. Caelius Sedulius is echoed especially freely, with a particular concentration on Books of the Carmen paschale, and indeed a startling focus on the first 100 lines of the work. Moreover, Aldhelm chooses a rhetorically embellished passage derived from Isidore's Synonyma on this very theme to form the closing words of his Epistola ad Acircium.
  • 31 - The library of the Venerable Bede
    pp 606-632
  • View abstract

    Summary

    To consider that the commentary on Genesis was just one of over forty works which Bede wrote, suggests the importance of assessing the extent of the library used by him. This chapter shows how Venerable Bede's library must have been assembled, and considers the tools available for reconstructing its contents, noting their limitations, and using some specific cases to illustrate the problems. Bede reworked and abbreviated De locis sanctis to produce his own De locis sanctis, and is the sole witness to the means by which Adomnán's work reached Northumbria. If the tangible re-creation of Bede's library continues to be a theme, then, surviving books themselves should be the starting-point. Bede's is a theological library, designed for a monastery inspired by the spirit of the Benedictine Rule. His library must have included biblical texts in various formats, including, a remarkable pandect in the old translation, namely the Codex Grandior.
  • 32 - The library of Alcuin’s York
    pp 633-664
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The evidence for York Minster's library in Anglo-Saxon England might just as aptly be compared to a long beam of light as to materials for a portrait for it illuminates library history, early medieval intellectual history and the social world of a unique book collection and of learning more generally. This was almost entirely from the distinctive perspective of Alcuin of York. There are testimonies about York's remarkable eighth-century library scattered through various contemporary writings, letters and poems. Shortly before his death in 780, Ælberht assigned his library to Alcuin. The Ælberht-Alcuin library was sufficiently well stocked to equip a fleeing missionary churchman generously - with copia librorum. Alcuin's poem about York illuminates the library in several ways. The poem's date and intended readership bear on the interpretation of its educational and bibliographical reminiscences. There is scant evidence about books and learning in York in the ninth century; what there is points to continuity, even if at a lower level.
  • 33 - The library of Cynewulf
    pp 665-669
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The single most important source detectable behind the oeuvre of Cynewulf is, unsurprisingly, the Bible, echoes of various parts of which are scattered throughout three of his four poems. Cynewulf's version of the Passio of St Juliana is nearest in all particulars to that which appears in an early ninth-century collection of Latin saints' lives now in Paris. The role of the Anglo-Saxon poet as editor and arranger, rather than as simple translator of his Latin material, is clearly demonstrated than in Cynewulf's handling of his sources for Fates of the Apostles. If three of his poems reveal a debt to hagiography, the fourth, Christ II, signals Cynewulf's knowledge of certain writings of the Fathers of the church. Cynewulf's corpus shows that he could handle the forms of vernacular poetry. As he had access to selected works by Gregory, Ambrose and Bede, it implies that the poet was based at a major ecclesiastical centre.
  • 34 - King Alfred and his circle
    pp 670-678
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter considers the collective body of writings associated with the ninth-century court of Alfred for the purpose of reconstructing the books available to Alfred and his circle. Three of these texts, the Pastoral Care, the Dialogues and the Ecclesiastical History, are fairly close translations of the original works, all of which were well known in earlier Anglo-Saxon England. The Alfredian version is the earliest evidence for the knowledge of the Consolatio in England. The possibility that the Alfredian circle drew on a commentary on the Latin Boethius has been much discussed. The main source of the Old English Orosius is the fifth-century Latin text of Paulus Orosius, entitled Historiae adversum paganos libri septem. The annals known as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are thought first to have been compiled in King Alfred's circle during the last decade of the ninth century.
  • 35 - Ælfric’s library
    pp 679-684
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Ælfric of Eynsham was a prolific writer. One important question about the nature of the resources available to him in Cerne or Eynsham is to what extent he relied on collections of excerpts or abridgements, whether compiled earlier by others or extracted by himself on visits to other libraries for his own future use, and did not have access to the full texts in his own library. He evidently made use of two Latin abridgements, of Julian of Toledo's Prognosticon and Alcuin's De animae ratione, which appear in a manuscript containing texts associated with him. For his homilies and saints' lives he relied heavily on two substantial collections of relevant Latin texts. Foremost of these was the vast homiliary compiled by Paul the Deacon. Ælfric used just about a hundred items from the collection in compiling the Catholic Homilies and later homiletic collections, choosing mainly work by (or attributed to) Augustine, Gregory and Bede.
  • 36 - The library of Byrhtferth
    pp 685-693
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The fenland abbey of Ramsey was founded in Anglo-Saxon England in 966. Fifty years later its most famous native son, the monk Byrhtferth was able to draw on the resources of a library containing slightly in excess of 100 titles. The search for books belonging to the early phases of Ramsey's library is thrown back on to the corpus of writings, in Latin and Old English, by Byrhtferth. These include computistical writings (a Latin Computus, and the Enchiridion, an introduction to the same Computus ), hagiography (Vita S. Oswaldi and Vita S. Ecgwini), and history (Historia regum), as well as a vast collectaneum of excerpts, classical, patristic and Carolingian, assembled to illustrate two treatises of Bede (De natura rerum and De temporum ratione), and known as the Glossae Bridferti in Bedam. An astronomical text which was apparently brought to Ramsey by Abbo and which is quoted on several occasions by Byrhtferth is the Astronomica of Hyginus.
  • 37 - The library of Wulfstan of York
    pp 694-700
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Wulfstan of York was by any measure a central figure in late Anglo-Saxon England. Clues to Wulfstan's range of reading can be gleaned from several different kinds of evidence, namely those books he annotated, those books he compiled, and those he echoed in his own works. Manuscripts, whether they were produced for or annotated by Wulfstan, or were compiled under his supervision, or seem to reflect earlier such compilations, are naturally of primary importance in attempting to reconstruct Wulfstan's library. No fewer than eighteen such manuscripts survive which provide an invaluable witness to what Wulfstan read and chose to be transmitted. Wulfstan's habits of reading and annotation contain a range of material, from collections of canon law, penitential texts, liturgical material, sermons and homilies and letters, together with the occasional poem. Reorganisation, repetition and recycling of the material at his disposal seem to have been the hallmark of all Wulfstan's work, as exemplified by his composition: Sermo Lupi ad Anglos.
  • 38 - Rhygyfarch ap Sulien and Ieuan ap Sulien
    pp 701-706
  • View abstract

    Summary

    Sulgenus Sapiens, Sulien the Wise of Llanbadarn Fawr in Ceredigion, was twice bishop of St David's. Quotations and allusions imply that Rhygyfarch and Ieuan had studied, first in the classical and Late Latin tradition, Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, Juvencus, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, Caelius Sedulius, Boethius, and possibly Statius, Horace and Juvenal. Second, the prose Lives imply that Rhygyfarch and Ieuan had studied the works of the primary Cambro-Latin author, Gildas: De excidio Brittanniae, Epistolae, and Penitential. In the third place, both brothers knew the earliest Armorico-Latin hagiographic text, the eighth-century Vita Sancti Samsonis. Rhygyfarch borrowed from the Life of Gregory and the Life of Samson stories about the golden-beaked dove, bringing them into play earlier in the Life of David and closer to his person than in the sources. Ieuan's poem in praise of his father records extended periods during which Sulien had studied in Ireland and in Scotland.
  • PART V - CODA
  • View abstract

    Summary

    A survey of antiquarian work on early British books should include the contribution of the remarkable palaeographer, Humfrey Wanley. His Librorum Veterum Septentrionalium qui in Angliae Bibliothecis extant. Catalogus provides a conspectus of relevant manuscripts that was not superseded until 1957. In 1910 and 1912 W. M. Lindsay issued his path-breaking handbooks on Early Irish Minuscule Script and Early Welsh Script, and three years later he reported British scribal practices among his exhaustive descriptions of early patterns of abbreviation, Notae Latinae. The number of early British manuscripts that have received detailed scrutiny is comparatively small. Fuller data concerning the survival of particular texts, and more accurate estimates as to the dates of individual manuscripts had facilitated the labours of scholars such as Clemoes, Cross, Godden, Hill, Pope and Scragg in exploring the sources, circulation and dissemination of Old English texts.

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