As for Cassiodorus’s own library, its fate is unknown

 A dim, uncertain flame still flickered, however, among early Christian monastic communities. Despite material poverty and religious mandates, the literary culture of antiquity persisted among the monks: in one anchorite community in Egypt around 600, the brethren scratched out not only scriptural passages but even lines from the Iliad and the Sentences of Menander, on ostraca, or potsherds. That no more suitable writing material could be found in a monastery in the homeland of papyrus may indicate the poverty of the community, although that didn’t stop the monks from pursuing reading and study. But perhaps it also suggests changes in the uses of reading and writing. After the fall of the Roman Empire, writing became a perishable medium; its uses were temporary and expedient. Without the empire’s hunger for stone inscription, without official decrees and speeches to put down on vellum and papyrus, little was being written for a permanent record. The monks wrote to learn to read and copy Scripture, and to exert themselves in spiritually rewarding labor. Besides that on ostraca, most writing in this time would have been inscribed on wax tablets, which by their nature do not survive long. It was probably from such wax tablets that Coptic monks in Egypt had first taken the inspiration to invent, or at least to perfect, the form of the book as we know it today: the codex. The wax tablet was an important writing medium from Mesopotamian days well into the Middle Ages. It has been speculated that the English word “book” in fact comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for beech (boc), the favored material from which the panels of tablets were fashioned. The panels typically were carved with a shallow reservoir into which beeswax could be poured; cool, the beeswax made a soft surface into which letters could be inscribed with a sharp stylus. A vigorous rubbing quickly erased the panel—very convenient for the writer, less so for the historian; no wax-tablet literature survives. Often two such panels were joined together with cord, though some writers preferred tablets of several panels. Possibly in Egypt, scribes adapted papyrus sheets to the format of the many-paneled wax tablet, replacing the scrolls that were the staple of antiquity. 

Near the town of Nag Hammadi in Egypt is the site where the monastery of Chenoboskion stood in the fourth century. In 1945, thirteen simple codices dating from the second half of the fourth century were found there, sealed in a clay jar. The texts these books contain have provided scholars with a fuller picture of the intellectual and spiritual world of the early Christians and the Gnostic sects with which they were in contact and conflict. The bindings survived as well, and they offer the best examples of the Coptic origin of the codex. The books consisted of simple folded gatherings of papyrus sheets sewn loosely into a leather cover. With their tied flaps, the Nag Hammadi codices look stylish, even by today’s standards. Fancy journal books constructed exactly like those of the Nag Hammadi library can be found in any stationery store today. 

And it was not only books that survived; in at least one case, the small monastic libraries preserved a whole literature as well. In the tenth century, a Syrian monastery led by Moses of Nisibis preserved some 250 manuscripts. Many of these were in Syriac, a Semitic language, close to Aramaic, which was spoken by the Nestorian community. In the Middle Ages, Syriac was a widespread language, of great importance to early Christians (Jesus, after all, spoke Aramaic). Syriac’s importance was not limited to Christian theology, however. Eighth-century bilingual stone inscriptions, in Chinese and Syriac, survive in modern Xian in China. Syriac had its great poets, too, such as Ephrem of Nisibis, who wrote in forms that had their roots in the cuneiform literatures of Mesopotamia. Tenth-century Moses had collected the books of these authors and others just in time, for the invading Turks nearly destroyed the Syriac tongue along with its speakers. The language is alive today in the mouths of those surviving speakers’ descendants, most of whom live in Syria, Iraq, Iran, and a diaspora spread from Turkey to western Europe. Much of what remains of Syriac literature, however, was preserved in the collection Moses made. 

Medieval trends not only in librarianship but in the entire monastic way of life sprang from Cassiodorus, a Roman noble and Christian who flourished in the sixth century. Cassiodorus had served the Ostrogothic king Theodoric until the eastern emperor Justinian laid siege to Rome and brought Italy under the rule of Constantinople. Cassiodorus lived to see the destruction of the last of Rome’s great libraries, the Palatine and Ulpian libraries, during the siege of the city. After the capital fell, Pope Agapetus established an important library and academy of his own; but Cassiodorus, nervous about the political role the established church had come to play, preferred to pursue the vita contemplativa outside of the church’s struggle for power with secular authorities. At his Calabrian estate, he founded a monastery that was to set the pattern for the medieval orders to come. Southern Italy was largely saved from the travails of war Rome suffered in those years. Cassiodorus’s haven, called Vivarium after nearby fishponds (evoking one of early Christianity’s guiding metaphors, that of the fishes), sheltered a program of library building and manuscript making of extraordinary energy and importance. At Vivarium, early versions of the Gospels were collected that would prove crucial to the transmission of Scripture through the Middle Ages. Sacred writings were, of course, privileged, though Cassiodorus took great pains to preserve the literary legacy of Greece and Rome as well. While nine of the armaria in his library were devoted to theological writings, another cabinet contained books of the Greek classics. Cassiodorus had his monks work assiduously on a program of translating and copying these works. His own great work, the Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum, helped put in place the epistemology of medieval Europe. A kind of encyclopedia, it ordered and explained all of sacred and secular thought for the benefit of the monks of Vivarium. In Cassiodorus’s view, each side of culture mirrored the other in a set of hierarchies that ranged, on the one hand, from the Bible through the writings of the Fathers of the church down to latter-day commentaries and, on the other hand, from the heights of Homer through the orators, dramatists, and historians of antiquity. This image of literature as a diptych of mirrored orderings of the divine and the worldly helped organize the libraries of the Middle Ages, down to great Renaissance libraries like that of the Vatican. 

As for Cassiodorus’s own library, its fate is unknown. At its greatest extent, in the seventh century, however, it probably contained no more than a few hundred books. The great Irish monastery at Bobbio, in northern Italy, whose library may have been modeled on Vivarium’s, in the tenth century contained 666 works. For all the aesthetic innovations in the form and illumination of books that flowed from them, medieval libraries in Europe were conservative places, where interest focused on a few venerated texts.

Library 

AN UNQUIET HISTORY 

Matthew Battles