Christian Library - Libraries in The Monastic Setting

Libraries in The Monastic Setting

The earliest examples come from Egypt. Monasteries under the direction of Pachomius (4th C.) and Shenouda (5th C.) required that members learn to read, and it was further expected that they would borrow and study texts from the community’s collection. (Twentieth-century archeological discoveries—Phobaimmon and Nag Hammadi, for example–-have indicated that there was a tremendous amount of activity in writing and copying texts, and one library “catalog” from the period lists eighty titles.) Collections were composed of biblical texts, lectionaries, church canons, hagiography/biography, etc.

In Eastern Christendom, monastic libraries developed on a similar pattern. “Catalogs” were simply inventories of items held by the community. On those rare occasions when a community's benefactor would give donate a personal collection, the tendency was not to dispose of questionable or even heretical works: given the short supply of texts, almost any item would be considered a “rare book.” The common practice in monastic life was for the abbot (or equivalent) to be charged with the responsibility for securing and caring for the collection.

It is from southern Italy that we receive the most enduring image of early Christian (and monastic) libraries and librarianship, in the person of Cassiodorus. Like no one else of his time, he leaves us a compendious work of bibliography, the Institituiones divinarum et saecularum litterarum, which surveys first Christian and then secular texts, providing notes and commentary along the way. An earlier attempt at Rome to establish a theological school had been frustrated, and so on his family’s estate at Calabria he established the “Vivarium”, as a setting in which “to incorporate systematic theological study into monastic life.” (Gamble, 1990) With this in view he assembled a large library of both Christian and Classical texts and designed a curriculum of study. He undertook his monastic and bibliographic work only after a long and well-rewarded career in the service of the Goths, and hence the work we remember him for can be seen as aspiring “to combat the growing chaos of the world” (Southern, “ Benedictine,” 167). We learn from the Institutiones how he had these sub-collections housed, what they included, together with how they were obtained.