Book burning

An old story goes that following a public debate between St Dominic and a group of heretics, the saint was kind enough to jot down his arguments for the non-believers to read at their leisure. That night the heretics decided to throw the document into a fire: if it burnt, they were correct; if it didn’t, Dominic’s faith was true. To their bafflement, three times they threw the manuscript into the flames, and three times, miraculously, it leapt out unscathed. But, as Robert Bartlett’s new work, History in Flames, reminds us, not all medieval manuscripts were afforded the luxury of incombustibility.

This is an account of the struggle between the destruction and survival of medieval manuscripts. The author recognizes the limitations of our pursuit of history, with its necessary reliance on the written word: “[W]e may be able to obtain ever more detailed knowledge of how Stonehenge was constructed, but we will never know the names of the builders”. The written word is key to unlocking a deeper past – yet, as Bartlett’s account shows, human beings, in angry crowds or invading armies, have often destroyed manuscripts through arson and bombing.

Occasionally, like The Book of Margery Kempe in the 1930s, medieval manuscripts are found serendipitously in a country-house cupboard while the occupants search for something else (in that case ping-pong balls). But the bulk of extant codices – a fraction of those originally produced – are held in archives and libraries. In post-medieval Europe there was a determined effort to collect and catalogue medieval material through the formation of national archives and national libraries, and this is a central part of Bartlett’s narrative of preservation and destruction. He reflects on the influence of nationalism in creating, and sometimes wrecking, centralized institutions. He notes that “the state can preserve, but it can also destroy” – after which it is the historian’s job to fashion a mosaic of the past out of the fragments.

The core of History in Flames focuses on the loss of material through five modern case studies. These consist of the bombardment of Strasbourg in 1870, the burning of the Public Record Office in Dublin in 1922 and the destruction of medieval material in the context of the Second World War: in Naples and Hanover in 1943, and Chartres in 1944. To take just one of these, the burning of a depository of the State Archives of Naples by German soldiers involved the loss of 30,000 volumes and 50,000 sheets of parchment. The soldiers’ motives were disputed, and this is ably discussed by Bartlett, but the result is the same. As the then head of archives, Riccardo Filangieri, lamented, the loss of the texts constituted “a void which nothing will ever be able to fill”.

This is not simply a book about loss. One prominent incident of survival, Beowulf, is discussed in detail. Remarkably, given its modern popularity, it survives in just one manuscript produced at the turn of the first millennium. Bartlett discusses the provenance of the manuscript and describes the unfortunate night in 1731 when Ashburnham House in London, where the manuscript was kept, caught fire. Several early medieval manuscripts were lost that night, but the one containing Beowulf, its binding destroyed and its edges scorched, survived.

The “heroes” here are the historians, archivists and librarians across centuries who, in preserving, transcribing and reconstructing these portions of written culture, made possible their influence on our sense of the past. Bartlett points the reader to current projects that make available the remnants of the documents once kept at Chartres and Strasbourg. The text is supplemented with facsimiles of leaves from medieval manuscripts, as well as more poignant imagery: smoke billowing from the Irish Public Record Office in 1922 and the skeletal cityscape of Hanover in 1945.

History in Flames is a book of rare quality that delicately balances simplicity and accessibility for the beginner with argumentative substance and stimulation for the initiated. It serves as a reminder of the fragility of the past and of humankind’s routine inability to “handle with care”.

Joshua Rice is a PhD Candidate in Medieval History at Royal Holloway, University of London

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