Monthly column on the arts: Conan the Librarian?

Of books and millennia

The other week I was the guest of the Librarian's Christian Fellowship at Winchester, where I was to give the LCF annual lecture (on Knowledge in the IT age, a theme you may have heard me expand on before in these pages). The Fellowship had arranged for its members and guests to be entertained in the morning by a guided tour of Winchester Cathedral Library.

Every time I go to Winchester - a mere half hour's drive from my home - I wonder why I don't go more often. After the guided tour I wondered why I had never visited the Cathedral Library before. The gift of a seventeenth-century Bishop who donated his large library to the diocese, it's housed in an ancient room built on to the Cathedral for that purpose. The books sit in stately rows on carved shelves, a pair of library globes that have sat in the room for centuries dominating the floor.

Visiting such a place prompts all sorts of reflections. Not least, the curiosity one has in inspecting anybody's books, for what it tells you about that person and their interests. The erudite bishop who bequeathed this collection was a man of wide tastes and much learning. His library is still used by scholars, which would no doubt have pleased him enormously. From such libraries we learn a great deal. We know the contents of the libraries of several Puritan and Independent ministers so we know that their reading was a good deal less narrow than we might have thought. Baxter's knowledge of Catholic meditation was not got by hearsay, for example, and libraries such as that of Bishop Hall of Oxford contain some surprises. Such library catalogues have been important in establishing the nature of Puritan thought, its sources and influences.

It was a salutary experience to wander round the library, in the city dominated by the statue of King Alfred in the high street. King Alfred is one of the reasons why the old concept of the Dark Ages has been so much revised in past decades. A man who is best remembered for his poor kitchen skills, he was a great scholar who, despite bewailing the poverty of contemporary scholarship, was surrounded by scholars. English learning is based on the writing of such men, including Alfred's own five great translations from the Latin fathers. Not bad, for a man who couldn't read until he was twelve. Not for the first time, I looked at Alfred's statue and wondered whether we've made all that much progress in a millennium.

Today, no doubt, Alfred would have been using the internet by the age of six and dashing off e-mails by the time he was eight. As a confirmed enthusiast for the new technology - eighteenth-century leather volumes and paperback computer books jostle for space on my study shelves - I'm grateful for many of the resources that today's youngsters possess and I think much good comes from them (as well as a terrible amount of rubbish, but much the same can be said of the tabloid press, etc.).

Word processing of a rather different kind is to be seen in the magnificent Winchester Bible, the jewel of the Cathedral library. This volume, created during the reign of Henry II by itinerant scribes whose work is known in other volumes and other places, is a triumph of calligraphy and illumination. Its pages have been invaluable for our knowledge of the English church, and the engaging personalities of the different people who worked on it are plain to see. The Master of the Leaping Figures, for example, ornaments his pages with dynamic, energy-packed figures contrasting strongly with the more sober, static approach of some of his colleagues. The theological implications are far-reaching. On a more practical level, the point in the project where the money ran out is very evident, as pages are left incomplete - sometimes in mid-verse - and figures are left in outline. It seems that economics played as much a part in church life then as it does these days. But incomplete as it is, this glorious book, its pigments as vibrant as the day they were mixed, its pages lovingly written in immaculate characters, survives as a record of a period of church life dominated by colour, energy, enthusiasm and craftsmanship.

Upstairs they have a small museum, where fragments of the old cathedral that were left after the iconoclasm of the seventeenth century give a glimpse of what Winchester must have looked like originally: the stone alive in painted colour, the Great Screen stunningly carved.

They were strange days. Great architecture is no substitute for reformed theology, and the Bishops of Winchester did own a lot of licensed brothels in pre-sixteenth century London. I must admit, too, that visiting some of the great cathedrals of Europe from which the glories of Winchester ultimately derive, I haven't always found them an aid to worship - sometimes the exact opposite. Nevertheless, visiting Winchester always makes me feel immensely grateful that so much beauty has survived the centuries, and I recommend the experience to all who cherish England's history.

David Porter

© Evangelicals Now - November 2000
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