Next September the Boole Library at University College, Cork is having a birthday party - for a book. The book is a collection of the lesser works of St Thomas Aquinas, found in the library of St Fin Barre's Cathedral which is at last, under the direction of Julian C. Walton, being examined, catalogued and prepared for use at the Boole. In the manner of early printed books this volume does not have a title page. it had no cover when found by Walton and lives instead within its special box of acid-free cardboard. When opened it is revealed that the printing details are at the end, where printers of that time generally inserted a colophon. This one is in Latin and reads, in Julian Walton's translation: "Here end the distinguished minor works of the learned and divine teacher Thomas of Aquino of the order of preaching brothers which have been very carefully edited and corrected and have been printed in Venice at the initiative and expense of Hermann Lichtenstein of Cologne in the year of salvation 1497 on the ides of September by the illustrious Augustin Barbadicus of Venice, God be praised."
Ides of September
On the ides - the 13th - of September 1997 this book will be 500 years old. It is the oldest book in the cathedral collection, but not by all that much; a sixvolume commentary on the Bible by Nicholas of Lyra (1270-1340) was printed in Basle in 1498 and used by John Henfeld, a monk at Battle Abbey near Hastings some time around 1500. We know this, Julian Walton explains, because Henfeld has written glosses throughout all six volumes and put his name to them - a little habit of his, it seems, to judge by another of his books which was found in the library of Hereford Cathedral after the dissolution of the monasteries. This work by Nicholas of Lyra belonged, in 1660, to the Rev William Snow, Vicar of Southcote in Oxfordshire, who was its first preserver. He had the volumes bound by a printer who used, for stiffening the spine, strips of any discarded old manuscript lying around the workshop at the time. These just happened to be 17th-century parchment deeds; the end papers were made from letters dealing with the confiscation of the estates of the defeated Royalists.
Julian Walton, who spent much of his first working life as a teacher in Dublin, is not a man to display jubilation with crude physical gyrations. Instead his eyes widen with enthusiasm, his smile loses its polite dimensions, the beam of appreciation which starts somewhere deep in his scholarly cranium shines over every feature.
With a kind of gleeful reverence he explains how a whole other manuscript - or two - can be discovered beneath the skin of these ancient tomes. As volunteer assistants Lorraine Lynch and Kevin Girvan brush the dust from every open page or feed a leather trim with a specially emollient wax, Julian displays the 1657 Polyglot Bible edited by Brian Walton, Bishop of Exeter (no relation, says Julian ruefully). The marbled inside cover is matched by a hand-ruled title page (here and elsewhere throughout the collection some of these are marvellous) and the text is the Latin Vulgate of St Jerome given in Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Chaldean, Samaritan, Arabic, Ethiopian and Persian.
Serious business
Bible study was a serious business in those days, of course, but the extra joy of these volumes (there are two complete sets of the six-volume Polyglot in the Cathedral library) is behind the binding. Although he would never say so it is obvious that when a book is falling to pieces Julian Walton is thrilled - Because the spine is fallen away and the padding is exposed; in this case the printer's strips were taken from the pages of a medieval Book of Hours: the Magnificat, handcopied, still very easy to read if you know Latin, the calligraphy dated to the 12th century.
They weren't above a bit of doodling, either, these scribes. Or testy marginalia: St Jerome was the translator of the Bible from Hebrew and Greek to Latin, giving us the Vulgate, or common version. His letters were edited by Erasmus of Rotterdam, the Renaissance scholar whose determination was to reform the Church from within rather than by schism. This book was printed in 1526 and here it is, with its hand-ruled title-page, its woodcuts, its commentary as Erasmus wrote it. But lines, paragraphs, an entire preface have been inked out. Exquisite little graffiti point to contentious sentences. Someone has written beside the attribution to Erasmus the Latin words: "notorious damned author!"
The tell-tale inscription is in an early 17th-century hand: "These letters are censored by Bro. Geronimo Gonzalez of the Order of St Dominic, Resident in San Pedro de Rio Seco." Brother Geronimo, of course, was an official of the Spanish Inquisition. This is the handwriting of a man who may have condemned heretics to the festival of Auto da Fe; from the force of his remarks he certainly would gladly have lit the faggots under the feet of Erasmus had it been possible. The oldest Irish-printed book within the 3,000-volume cathedral library is a vellum-bound A Briefe Abstract of All the English Statutes in force within the Realm of Ireland. Dating from 1625, it is literally a pocketbook, small enough for lawyers to carry around with them and printed in Dublin by the Society of Stationers. Also pocket-sized is a Book of Instruments, a textbook for students of the law in 1546 with the prayers and admonitions of its various owners - mostly Nicolsons after 1617 - and printed in the dense black Gothic style created to imitate monastic manuscript so that customers would be persuaded they were buying a real book.
Founding of library
Julian Walton is coming to this task of restoration at UCC after a two-year stint of the same kind with the library of Christ Church Cathedral in Waterford. Founded in 1720 by Bishop Peter Browne and endowed in 1723 by Archdeacon John Pomeroy, the library of St Fin Barre was built up with purchases and other acquisitions and was housed until 1982 in the small and largely neglected library building in the grounds. Then Dean Maurice Carey realised that it must be saved urgently, and oversaw its purchase by UCC and its removal to the safer shelves of Q-1 at the nearby Boole. Opening a 1775 volume of speeches from the House of Lords to reveal the lattice-work of the bookworm and diverted for a moment into the social life of the beetle, Walton agrees that it is a cause of regret that libraries of this kind are leaving their original sites. But he believes that the universities are the natural successors of the cathedrals as repositories of scholarship. Now St Fin Barre's is preparing for its celebrations of the year 2000; it may be that this library project, begun by UCC late last year, will form part of its declaration to the future.