A History of Benedictine Libraries and Their Afterlives (Part Two)

A History of Benedictine Libraries and Their Afterlives (Part Two) Hugh Feiss O.S.B. (bio) Hugh Feiss Hugh Feiss, O.S.B., Monastery of the Ascension, Jerome, ID, is co-editor and a contributor to A Benedictine Reader 530–1530 (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2019). He is subprior, oblate director, and editor of the Desert Chronicle for his monastery. Part One of this article appeared in American Benedictine Review 72, no. 4 (December 2021), 368-383. Footnotes 1. See Hugh Feiss and Ronald Pepin, "Pope Benedict XII," in A Benedictine Reader: 530–1530, ed. Hugh Feiss, Ronald E. Pepin, and Maureen M. O'Brien, Cistercian Studies 275 (Collegeville, MN: Cistercian Publications, 2019), 470–494; R. M. Thomson, "Worcester Monks and Education, c.1300," in The Culture of Medieval English Monasticism, ed. James G. Clark, Studies in the History of Medieval Religion (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2007), 104–110. 2. F. M. Wormald, "The Monastic Library," in The English Library before 1700, ed. Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1958), 21. 3. Wormald, "The Monastic Library," 18. 4. Richard Sharpe, "The Medieval Librarian," in Elizabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, eds., The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland, Volume I: To 1640 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 1.218–244. 5. This section is based on Seb Falk, The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science (New York: W. W. Norton, 2020). 6. David Bell, "What Nuns Read: The State of the Question," in Clark, Culture, 113–133. 7. Mary C. Erler, "Private Reading in the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century English Nunnery," in Clark, Culture, 134–146. 8. A. B. Emden, Donors of Books to S. Augustine's Abbey Canterbury, Oxford Bibliographical Society Occasional Publication 4 (Oxford: Oxford Bibliographical Society, Bodleian Library, 1968). 9. R. M. Wilson, "The Contents of the Medieval Library," in Wormald and Wright, The English Library, 85–111. As the author points out, there is no guarantee that these surviving catalogues are representative. They also include non-monastic libraries such as those at Oxford and Cambridge, but this summary is a fairly accurate representation of the contents of at least the larger monastic libraries. 10. William Smith, "The English Benedictines and the Early Printed Book," American Benedictine Review, 72, no. 1 (March 2021): 41–47. 11. Smith, "English Benedictines and the Early Printed Book," 27–41. 12. A. J. Piper, "Thomas Swalwell: Monk of Durham, Archivist and Bibliophile (d. 1539)," in Books and Collectors 1200–1700: Essays Presented to Andrew Watson, ed. James P. Carley and Colin G. C. Tite, British Library Studies in the History of the Book (London: The British Library, 1997), 71–99. 13. Richard Ovenden, Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020), 62. Ovenden is Director of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. 14. John Leland, De uiris illustribus; On Famous Men, ed. James P. Carley (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies/Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2010), 67, 69; cited by Ovenden, Burning, 51; James P. Carley, "The Dispersal of Monastic Libraries and the Salvaging of the Spoils," in Leedham-Green and Webber, Cambridge History of Libraries, 1:265–266, 273–281. Leland visited libraries of many different religious institutions; he praised Benedictine libraries as the best maintained. 15. In an often-cited remark, in his account of Leland's journey, John Bale wrote: "To destroy all without consideration, is and will be unto England for ever, a most horrible infamy. A great number of them which purchased those superstitious mansions, reserved of those library books, some to rub their boots. Some they sold to the grocers and soap sellers, and some they sent to overseas to the bookbinders, not in small number, but at times whole ships full, to the wondering of foreign nations … What may bring our realm to more shame and rebuke, than to have it known abroad, that we are despisers of learning?" Cited by Ovenden, Burning the Books, 55. 16. N. P. Ker, cited in Carley, "Dispersal," 291. 17. Alan Coates, English Medieval Books: The Reading Abbey Collections from Foundation to Dispersal...

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