Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge under Attack by Richard Ovenden (review)

The title and subtitle of this book perhaps give a slightly misleading indication of its contents. It is indeed about the frequently deliberate destruction of books and other documents, sometimes involving fire but also military action, religiously inspired vandalism, and (at least in the author's view) 'underfunding, low prioritization and general disregard' (p. 36) in the case of the ancient library of Alexandria. It is not primarily a book about censorship, though of course censorship of knowledge materials and their deliberate destruction are often closely associated. But almost as much as it is about such deliberate destruction it is an account of efforts to prevent it happening. Richard Ovenden is the twenty-fifth Bodley's Librarian in succession to Thomas James at the beginning of the seventeenth century, and thus the director of the Bodleian Libraries at the University of Oxford. His pride in the preservation achievements over four centuries of the library system that he oversees is frequently in evidence, and the book is in part a celebration of the preservation activities of librarians and a plea that they be adequately funded to continue this role.

This relatively short history ranges from ancient Assyria to the present. Two chapters are likely to be of particular interest to readers of Parergon. Chapter 3, 'When Books were Dog Cheap', provides a powerful account of the losses when the monasteries of England were dissolved during the Reformation period. Ovenden states that 'in Britain alone, tens of thousands of books were burned or broken up and sold as scrap' (p. 54). Between seventy and eighty per cent of the contents of the pre-Reformation libraries of Britain and Ireland are reliably believed to have been lost. Ovenden's focus is on monasteries, but they were not the only target, and the destruction was not confined to Britain, though the apparently large-scale Continental Reformation period destruction receives only passing mention. He makes the valuable point that we are confronted not only with the total disappearance of works that once existed, but also with the loss of evidence of how widely works were disseminated, what was available where, and what was being read by whom.

Chapter 4, 'An Ark to Save Learning', is largely concerned with the circumstances surrounding the creation and early history of the Bodleian Library, which opened its door to readers in 1602. An apparently fairly impressive predecessor university library had been entirely dismantled by religious reformers in the 1550s, but thanks to the energy of the micromanaging Sir Thomas Bodley (1547–1613) the new library got off to a strong start. In a later chapter we learn that books looted by an English expedition in 1596 from the Bishop of Faro's library in Portugal were among its earliest acquisitions—the Vatican library benefited similarly a few decades later from the looting of a German Protestant prince's library holdings.

Other chapters deal with later destruction, but quite frequently mention the loss or timely rescue of medieval and early modern books and manuscripts. The extraordinary recent adventures and eventual survival of the celebrated Sarajevo Haggadah, a fourteenth-century Hebrew manuscript of Spanish origin, are described in a chapter entitled 'Sarajevo Mon Amour', largely devoted to the 1990s war in Bosnia. The final chapter, largely about present-day concerns, begins with an account of the officially mandated burning of John Milton's works in a University of Oxford quadrangle in 1660 following the Restoration, and the brave decision of the then Bodley's Librarian to hide works the poet had presented to the library.

This is a work for the general reader, and probably not vital professional reading for those for whom Parergon caters. But despite its librarian's viewpoint (and perhaps a sometimes-obtrusive tendency to boast about what the Bodleian has preserved and still holds!) it is a fascinating and very readable work full of interesting details and observations. In...