The Vatican Library and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: The History, Impact, and Influence of Their Collaboration (1927–1947) (review)

One of the great centers for ancient and medieval manuscripts as well as for early printed books, the Vatican Library nevertheless hardly seemed fit for scholarship and consultation when Pope Leo XIII began the process of modernizing it in 1884. Under its German-born director, Franz Ehrle (1895–1914), the project slowly gathered speed but faced many obstacles. An American visitor claimed that the library was "a miser's treasure" buried under red tape and weighed heavily down by bureaucratic inertia (11–12 n. 12). But the real problems, according to this dissertation from Indiana University completed in 1991 by the Italian American librarian Nicoletta Mattioli Háry, were the lack of cataloging to facilitate access and the scattering of its riches into separate physical collections based on provenance rather than subject.

The Vatican Library was not unique in lacking a single or comprehensive catalog, but, somewhat surprisingly, it requested American help in the 1920s and 1930s. The papal librarians were conscious of the need for reform but also wanted to free it from competing European entanglements, and the Americans seemed a likely source of funding. This was only shortly after the great period of Carnegie largess, while the Carnegie Endowment under Nicholas Butler was receptive partly for personal reasons. The amounts eventually granted would seem very small even for that age but did bring American academic cataloging methods and interest in patron-based service to a continent aware of American public libraries but not much else. Prior to the 1920s French influence had been greater at the Vatican, since Italy was considered hostile and Germany predominantly Protestant. The Americans, it might be said, were more neutral, farther away, and richer. For their part, as William Warner Bishop of the University of Michigan wrote, the Americans believed that the Vatican Library's prestige merited their effort to help, despite difficulties of distance and language. Bishop wanted to rescue it from the influence of the Bibliothèque nationale ("No more backward library exists" [103]). Bishop is indeed one of the heroes of this book, along with the French priest and later cardinal Eugène Tisserant and the Italian Giovanni Mercati, who also became a cardinal.

Despite the detailed, even voluminous, nature of Háry's work, readers might want more historical context. This was, after all, the period of Mussolini and the Lateran Accords and, in the United States, the Wilkerson report, which indicated grave deficiencies in American library education. Surely the latter must have occasioned some concern within Vatican Library circles: why should they be learning from the Americans if the latter's education methods were little more than clerical? A greater attention to secondary works would have been helpful here too, and indeed there is no mention of research published since 1990–91. Quite a lot of the book concerns cataloging questions of the time, the Italian tradition being "più teoretica che practica" (563 n. 84).

Háry quotes liberally from original documents in Italian, French, and German, often without translating or paraphrasing in English. Much of the book is organized in strict chronological fashion and filled with excessive detail of often minor importance, such as which ship a cleric or librarian sailed on or his or her exact itinerary. This makes following more thematic discussions difficult. On the other hand, she has done extensive research in manuscript and published sources in Europe and the United States. The notes often are worth reading in their own right. The index, admirably full, runs over forty-five pages.

Special problems were encountered during this modernization (or, as Baudelaire would say, Americanization) because not only were the collections large, diverse, and sometimes fragile but the facilities were small, cramped, and poorly designed. A partial floor collapse in 1931 killed five people. Probably...