Skip navigation
London Review of Books London Review Bookshop

The Most Learned Man in Europe subscriber-only content

Tom Shippey

The Anglo-Saxons had no libraries in the sense that we understand the word: rooms, or better still buildings, dedicated to the storage of books. St Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote a Latin riddle with the title arca libraria, but what that means is, clearly, ‘book-box’. Very few Anglo-Saxons had access to enough books to warrant even a bookshelf. As Michael Lapidge tells us, they kept their ‘libraries’ in boxes, and when an Anglo-Saxon scholar ‘wished to consult a book, he got down on his hands and knees and rummaged round in the chest until he came upon the book he required’. Neither the boxes nor their contents have survived, destroyed by the traditional enemies of learning: time, fire, Vikings, but perhaps more than anything reformers and reforming librarians. Lapidge’s book might have been subtitled, ‘An Enquiry into Works Available to Anglo-Saxon Authors Writing in Latin, Excluding Those Purely Liturgical’. Since most of those texts have vanished, Lapidge’s book is for the most part detective work, a kind of forensic exercise in what he calls ‘palaeobibliothecography’. Its learning is immense, its results – well, not for the general reader.

subscriber-only content Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.

Tom Shippey’s most recent book is a collection of his papers on Tolkien, Roots and Branches; an anthology, The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm’s Mythology of the Monstrous, has just won the Mythopoeic Society’s Scholarship Award for 2008.

LRB cover artwork

From the archive

Versailles with Panthers
James Davidson pays tribute to the Persians

Reasons to be Miserable
James Meek: The Day My Pants Froze

Smut-Finder General
Colin Kidd: The Dark Side of American Liberalism

Could it have been different?
Eric Hobsbawm: Budapest 1956

Family Fortunes
Helen Cooper: The upwardly mobile Pastons