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Review article: When is a library not a library?

The question of how the cultural history of pre-industrial societies is to be investigated is rather too important to be left to departments of Literature. The Anglo-Saxon age offers a particular instance, remarkable and almost unique in the early medieval west, because of the emergence of a literary and administrative language other than Latin. With uncharacteristically philistine indifference John Blair’s recent book on The Church in Anglo-Saxon Society speculates on the status implications of the stylus but regards books and manuscripts as well outside his remit. Nor is he alone here. In this climate the task of the scholar who studies the circulation of texts is difficult: lists of titles and lists of manuscripts are undoubtedly an essential resource, but they may nonetheless require some explanation, as medieval texts are assumed to do. Most general accounts of intellectual history are all too grey. It is no accident that M.L.W. Laistner’s Thought and Letters in Western Europe and Pierre Riché’s Education and Culture in the Barbarian West 2 are books which are consulted, rather than read (neither is cited here). And they suffer from that flaw pinpointed by Marc Bloch in his review of Marrou’s St Augustin et la fin de la culture antique; ‘Laisser dans l’ombre à peu près totale l’action exercée sur la ‘culture’ d’une élite par les forces les plus générales de la vie de societé.’ General forces shaping and transforming the life of a society have yet to find their place in early medieval intellectual history. Any reader of Michael Lapidge’s book, the published version of his thrilling Lowe lectures, who is either perverse or learned enough to start