Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods

Libraries in the Medieval and
Renaissance
by J. W. Clark

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Title: Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods The Rede Lecture Delivered
June 13, 1894
Author: J. W. Clark
Release Date: October 1, 2006 [EBook #19415]
Language: English
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[Illustration: FIG. 2. General view of part of the Library attached to the Church of S.
Wallberg at Zutphen.
Frontispiece]

LIBRARIES
IN THE
MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE PERIODS.

THE REDE LECTURE, DELIVERED JUNE 13, 1894
BY
J.W. CLARK, M.A., F.S.A. REGISTRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY, AND
FORMERLY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.
CAMBRIDGE: MACMILLAN AND BOWES. 1894

The lecture was illustrated by lantern-slides. A brief notice of each of these is printed in
the text in Italics at the place in the lecture where the slide was exhibited.

LIBRARIES.
A library may be considered from two very different points of view: as a workshop, or as
a Museum.
The former commends itself to the practical turn of mind characteristic of the present day;
common sense urges that mechanical ingenuity, which has done so much in other
directions, should be employed in making the acquisition of knowledge less cumbrous
and less tedious; that as we travel by steam, so we should also read by steam, and be
helped in our studies by the varied resources of modern invention. There lies on my table
at this present moment a Handbook of Library Appliances, in which fifty-three closely
printed pages are devoted to this interesting subject, with illustrations of various
contrivances by which the working of a large library is to be facilitated and brought up to
date. In fact, from this point of view a library may be described as a gigantic
mincing-machine, into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a
slightly altered form as the literature of the present.
If, on the other hand, a library be regarded as a Museum--and I use the word in its
original sense as a temple or haunt of the Muses--very different ideas are evoked. Such a
place is as useful as the other--every facility for study is given--but what I may call the
personal element as affecting the treasures there assembled is brought prominently
forward. The development of printing, as the result of individual effort; the art of
bookbinding, as practised by different persons in different countries; the history of the
books themselves, the libraries in which they have found a home, the hands that have
turned their pages, are there taken note of. Modern literature is fully represented, but the
men of past days are not thrust out of sight; their footsteps seem to linger in the rooms
where once they walked--their shades seem to protect the books they once handled. What
Browning felt about frescoes may be applied--mutatis mutandis--to books in such an
asylum as I am trying to portray:
Wherever a fresco peels and drops, Wherever an outline weakens and wanes Till the
latest life in the painting stops, Stands One whom each fainter pulse-tick pains: One,
wishful each scrap should clutch the brick, Each tinge not wholly escape the plaster, A

lion who dies of an ass's kick, The wronged great soul of an ancient Master.
It may be safely asserted that at no time has a love of reading, a desire to be fairly
well-informed on all sorts of subjects, been so widely diffused as at the present day. As a
necessary consequence of this the 'workshop' view of a library has been very generally
accepted. I have no wish to undervalue it; I only plead for the recognition of another
sentiment which may at times be overlaid by the pressure of daily avocations. In
Cambridge, at least, there is no fear that it should ever be obliterated altogether, for we
have effected a happy alliance between the present and the past, by which neither is
neglected, neither is unduly prominent. This being the case, it has occurred to me that I
may be so fortunate as to interest a Cambridge audience while I set before them some of
the results at which I have arrived in investigating the position, the arrangement, and the
fittings of libraries in the medieval and renaissance periods. It will, of course, be
impossible to attempt more