The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
Chapter VIII
Of the numerous opportunities we have had of
collecting a store of books
Since to everything there is a season and an opportunity,
as the wise Ecclesiastes witnesseth, let us now proceed to
relate the manifold opportunities through which we have been
assisted by the divine goodness in the acquisition of
books.
Although from our youth upwards we had always delighted
in holding social commune with learned men and lovers of
books, yet when we prospered in the world and made
acquaintance with the King's majesty and were received into
his household, we obtained ampler facilities for visiting
everywhere as we would, and of hunting as it were certain
most choice preserves, libraries private as well as public,
and of the regular as well as of the secular clergy. And
indeed while we filled various offices to the victorious
Prince and splendidly triumphant King of England, Edward the
Third from the Conquest--whose reign may the Almighty long
and peacefully continue--first those about his court, but
then those concerning the public affairs of his kingdom,
namely the offices of Chancellor and Treasurer, there was
afforded to us, in consideration of the royal favour, easy
access for the purpose of freely searching the retreats of
books. In fact, the fame of our love of them had been soon
winged abroad everywhere, and we were reported to burn with
such desire for books, and especially old ones, that it was
more easy for any man to gain our favour by means of books
than of money. Wherefore, since supported by the goodness of
the aforesaid prince of worthy memory, we were able to
requite a man well or ill, to benefit or injure mightily
great as well as small, there flowed in, instead of presents
and guerdons, and instead of gifts and jewels, soiled tracts
and battered codices, gladsome alike to our eye and heart.
Then the aumbries of the most famous monasteries were thrown
open, cases were unlocked and caskets were undone, and
volumes that had slumbered through long ages in their tombs
wake up and are astonished, and those that had lain hidden
in dark places are bathed in the ray of unwonted light.
These long lifeless books, once most dainty, but now become
corrupt and loathsome, covered with litters of mice and
pierced with the gnawings of the worms, and who were once
clothed in purple and fine linen, now lying in sackcloth and
ashes, given up to oblivion, seemed to have become
habitations of the moth. Natheless among these, seizing the
opportunity, we would sit down with more delight than a
fastidious physician among his stores of gums and spices,
and there we found the object and the stimulus of our
affections. Thus the sacred vessels of learning came into
our control and stewardship; some by gift, others by
purchase, and some lent to us for a season.
No wonder that when people saw that we were contented
with gifts of this kind, they were anxious of their own
accord to minister to our needs with those things that they
were more willing to dispense with than the things they
secured by ministering to our service. And in good will we
strove so to forward their affairs that gain accrued to
them, while justice suffered no disparagement. Indeed, if we
had loved gold and silver goblets, high-bred horses, or no
small sums of money, we might in those days have furnished
forth a rich treasury. But in truth we wanted manuscripts
not moneyscripts; we loved codices more than florins, and
preferred slender pamphlets to pampered palfreys.
Besides all this, we were frequently made ambassador of
this most illustrious Prince of everlasting memory, and were
sent on the most various affairs of state, now to the Holy
See, now to the Court of France, and again to various powers
of the world, on tedious embassies and in times of danger,
always carrying with us, however, that love of books which
many waters could not quench. For this like a delicious
draught sweetened the bitterness of our journeyings and
after the perplexing intricacies and troublesome
difficulties of causes, and the all but inextricable
labyrinths of public affairs afforded us a little breathing
space to enjoy a balmier atmosphere.
O Holy God of gods in Sion, what a mighty stream of
pleasure made glad our hearts whenever we had leisure to
visit Paris, the Paradise of the world, and to linger there;
where the days seemed ever few for the greatness of our
love! There are delightful libraries, more aromatic than
stores of spicery; there are luxuriant parks of all manner
of volumes; there are Academic meads shaken by the tramp of
scholars; there are lounges of Athens; walks of the
Peripatetics; peaks of Parnassus; and porches of the Stoics.
There is seen the surveyor of all arts and sciences
Aristotle, to whom belongs all that is most excellent in
doctrine, so far as relates to this passing sublunary world;
there Ptolemy measures epicycles and eccentric apogees and
the nodes of the planets by figures and numbers; there Paul
reveals the mysteries; there his neighbour Dionysius
arranges and distinguishes the hierarchies; there the virgin
Carmentis reproduces in Latin characters all that Cadmus
collected in Phoenician letters; there indeed opening our
treasuries and unfastening our purse-strings we scattered
money with joyous heart and purchased inestimable books with
mud and sand. It is naught, it is naught, saith every buyer.
But in vain; for behold how good and how pleasant it is to
gather together the arms of the clerical warfare, that we
may have the means to crush the attacks of heretics, if they
arise.
Further, we are aware that we obtained most excellent
opportunities of collecting in the following way. From our
early years we attached to our society with the most
exquisite solicitude and discarding all partiality all such
masters and scholars and professors in the several faculties
as had become most distinguished by their subtlety of mind
and the fame of their learning. Deriving consolation from
their sympathetic conversation, we were delightfully
entertained, now by demonstrative chains of reasoning, now
by the recital of physical processes and the treatises of
the doctors of the Church, now by stimulating discourses on
the allegorical meanings of things, as by a rich and
well-varied intellectual feast. Such men we chose as
comrades in our years of learning, as companions in our
chamber, as associates on our journeys, as guests at our
table, and, in short, as helpmates in all the vicissitudes
of life. But as no happiness is permitted to endure for
long, we were sometimes deprived of the bodily companionship
of some of these shining lights, when justice looking down
from heaven, the ecclesiastical preferments and dignities
that they deserved fell to their portion. And thus it
happened, as was only right, that in attending to their own
cures they were obliged to absent themselves from attendance
upon us.
We will add yet another very convenient way by which a
great multitude of books old as well as new came into our
hands. For we never regarded with disdain or disgust the
poverty of the mendicant orders, adopted for the sake of
Christ; but in all parts of the world took them into the
kindly arms of our compassion, allured them by the most
friendly familiarity into devotion to ourselves, and having
so allured them cherished them with munificent liberality of
beneficence for the sake of God, becoming benefactors of all
of them in general in such wise that we seemed none the less
to have adopted certain individuals with a special fatherly
affection. To these men we were as a refuge in every case of
need, and never refused to them the shelter of our favour,
wherefore we deserved to find them most special furtherers
of our wishes and promoters thereof in act and deed, who
compassing land and sea, traversing the circuit of the
world, and ransacking the universities and high schools of
various provinces, were zealous in combatting for our
desires, in the sure and certain hope of reward. What
leveret could escape amidst so many keen-sighted hunters?
What little fish could evade in turn their hooks and nets
and snares? From the body of the Sacred Law down to the
booklet containing the fallacies of yesterday, nothing could
escape these searchers. Was some devout discourse uttered at
the fountain-head of Christian faith, the holy Roman Curia,
or was some strange question ventilated with novel
arguments; did the solidity of Paris, which is now more
zealous in the study of antiquity than in the subtle
investigation of truth, did English subtlety, which
illumined by the lights of former times is always sending
forth fresh rays of truth, produce anything to the
advancement of science or the declaration of the faith, this
was instantly poured still fresh into our ears, ungarbled by
any babbler, unmutilated by any trifler, but passing
straight from the purest of wine-presses into the vats of
our memory to be clarified.
But whenever it happened that we turned aside to the
cities and places where the mendicants we have mentioned had
their convents, we did not disdain to visit their libraries
and any other repositories of books; nay, there we found
heaped up amid the utmost poverty the utmost riches of
wisdom. We discovered in their fardels and baskets not only
crumbs falling from the masters' table for the dogs, but the
shewbread without leaven and the bread of angels having in
it all that is delicious; and indeed the garners of Joseph
full of corn, and all the spoil of the Egyptians, and the
very precious gifts which Queen Sheba brought to
Solomon.
These men are as ants ever preparing their meat in the
summer, and ingenious bees continually fabricating cells of
honey. They are successors of Bezaleel in devising all
manner of workmanship in silver and gold and precious stones
for decorating the temple of the Church. They are cunning
embroiderers, who fashion the breastplate and ephod of the
high priest and all the various vestments of the priests.
They fashion the curtains of linen and hair and coverings of
ram's skins dyed red with which to adorn the tabernacle of
the Church militant. They are husbandmen that sow, oxen
treading out corn, sounding trumpets, shining Pleiades and
stars remaining in their courses, which cease not to fight
against Sisera. And to pay due regard to truth, without
prejudice to the judgment of any, although they lately at
the eleventh hour have entered the lord's vineyard, as the
books that are so fond of us eagerly declared in our sixth
chapter, they have added more in this brief hour to the
stock of the sacred books than all the other vine-dressers;
following in the footsteps of Paul, the last to be called
but the first in preaching, who spread the gospel of Christ
more widely than all others. Of these men, when we were
raised to the episcopate we had several of both orders,
viz., the Preachers and Minors, as personal attendants and
companions at our board, men distinguished no less in
letters than in morals, who devoted themselves with
unwearied zeal to the correction, exposition, tabulation,
and compilation of various volumes. But although we have
acquired a very numerous store of ancient as well as modern
works by the manifold intermediation of the religious, yet
we must laud the Preachers with special praise, in that we
have found them above all the religious most freely
communicative of their stores without jealousy, and proved
them to be imbued with an almost Divine liberality, not
greedy but fitting possessors of luminous wisdom.
Besides all the opportunities mentioned above, we secured
the acquaintance of stationers and booksellers, not only
within our own country, but of those spread over the realms
of France, Germany, and Italy, money flying forth in
abundance to anticipate their demands; nor were they
hindered by any distance or by the fury of the seas, or by
the lack of means for their expenses, from sending or
bringing to us the books that we required. For they well
knew that their expectations of our bounty would not be
defrauded, but that ample repayment with usury was to be
found with us.
Nor, finally, did our good fellowship, which aimed to
captivate the affection of all, overlook the rectors of
schools and the instructors of rude boys. But rather, when
we had an opportunity, we entered their little plots and
gardens and gathered sweet-smelling flowers from the surface
and dug up their roots, obsolete indeed, but still useful to
the student, which might, when their rank barbarism was
digested heal the pectoral arteries with the gift of
eloquence. Amongst the mass of these things we found some
greatly meriting to be restored, which when skilfully
cleansed and freed from the disfiguring rust of age,
deserved to be renovated into comeliness of aspect. And
applying in full measure the necessary means, as a type of
the resurrection to come, we resuscitated them and restored
them again to new life and health.
Moreover, we had always in our different manors no small
multitude of copyists and scribes, of binders, correctors,
illuminators, and generally of all who could usefully labour
in the service of books. Finally, all of both sexes and of
every rank or position who had any kind of association with
books, could most easily open by their knocking the door of
our heart, and find a fit resting-place in our affection and
favour. In so much did we receive those who brought books,
that the multitude of those who had preceded them did not
lessen the welcome of the after-comers, nor were the favours
we had awarded yesterday prejudicial to those of to-day.
Wherefore, ever using all the persons we have named as a
kind of magnets to attract books, we had the desired
accession of the vessels of science and a multitudinous
flight of the finest volumes.
And this is what we undertook to narrate in the present
chapter.
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- The Philobiblon
by Richard de Bury
Chapter VII
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