Teresa Webber

Celtic Britain and Ireland in the early middle ages

The history of book collections and libraries in the islands of Britain and Ireland begins with Celtic Britain. This area inherited the literary culture of the Roman Empire, while also receiving from the same source in the fourth century the new official religion of Christianity with its book culture centred on the Bible and Christian liturgy. Thus, Celtic Britain had two traditions of literate learning, each with its own type of books: the learning of the late Roman schools with their classical education; and the monastic schools of late antiquity, for whom the highest expression of learning was the study of Scripture. Although no physical evidence for the first type of learning has survived, its existence can be inferred from such British writers as Pelagius and Gildas, both of whom demonstrate in their Latin writings mastery of classical prose style and knowledge of the Roman poets. Both also bear witness to the availability of Christian literature in Celtic Britain, as evidenced by their profound knowledge of the Bible and of Christian writers such as Jerome, Sulpicius Severus and Orosius. Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire and so did not directly inherit either its classical or Christian learning. Moreover, Ireland’s culture was oral during that period, except for the limited use of a specialised script known as ogam. In the fifth century, Ireland received Christianity and its concomitant literate culture, most likely from British missionaries such as St Patrick. British influence in the formation of Irish Christian culture is evident in the presence of words in Old Irish borrowed from the British vernacular, many of an ecclesiastical character; the formation of a new alphabet for writing Irish based on the Latin alphabet as it was pronounced by British speakers; and the late antique features of Irish manuscript production and script, presumably based upon British models.

The early modern library (to c. 1640)

Before we proceed to discuss developments in the physical setting of libraries from the later fifteenth century onwards it is worth clarifying the different names used for different types of book shelving, as the terminology in contemporary records is not consistent. In what follows I use ‘lectern’ to describe a sloping desk, often double-sided, with a shelf or shelves below it. A ‘stall’ is, here, a lectern that has shelves superimposed on it at a later date. A ‘press’ is a shelved cupboard, and a ‘bookcase’ is the familiar upright shelving of today, often standing in pairs back to back. The lectern libraries, as we have seen, were seldom capable of accommodating, and were indeed never intended to accommodate, an institution’s entire book holdings, and certainly seem often to have been built or first furnished with no idea of expansion. What we know of Leicester Abbey in the late fifteenth century was very likely true of other libraries, and it was certainly so from the early sixteenth century. Neil Ker notes, of the necessity of laying books flat and in piles, that ‘almost certainly books were piled thus “subitus”, below the desks, during the sixteenth century, in the crowded libraries built originally to house manuscripts and receiving now a flood of printed books’. The ‘public’ university libraries founded to provide access to key texts for poor scholars were no longer a sufficient resource as both the nature of books and the manner of studying them evolved. Nevertheless, lectern libraries continued to be set up well into the second half of the sixteenth century, as witness the case of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, discussed below. Why and how did these lectern libraries survive for so long?