forgive me my tagents...
By 537 AD,
Pope Justinian had already banned the practice of
Hebrew worship and again drove the culture of the
sacred book underground. However, at the same time, Europe was largely itself descending into a protracted social and intellectual hibernation, as the cultural stability and economic conditions necessary to sustain wide-spread learning dwindled with the waning powers of the
Holy Roman Empire. For the vast majority of the former imperial provinces, subsistence became the one, true focus and it is in this context that
the Church, by controlling a remote network of
monasteries, became the sole guardian of
knowledge for almost six centuries of bitter hardship as the
Republic gave way to
theocratic feudalism.
In 529 AD,
St. Benedict established his
Rule, as a framework of
study,
work and
prayer under which, by the 11th century, thousands of monks in 300 monasteries reaching from the
British Isles to
Palestine, would toil. The emphasis here, it must be said, was placed largely on maintaining skills of
reading,
writing and
copying among the devoted and the texts deemed significant to the faith.
Preservation for posterity was the divine motivation in the endless work undertaken by the various brotherhoods (...
sound familiar, anyone?).
Any benefits of
education or creative development or
expression were considered secondary, quite possibly even deemed detrimental to the true task at hand. Books in the
scriptoriums and libraries of
medieval monasteries were frequently chained in place (known as
cantenati) which should be interpreted as a significant symbol of the Church's approach to the dissemination of information at the time. If you needed a book, you needed certain
Christian and officially-sanctioned credentials in order to gain admission to the
monastery and
library (which is not an entirely remote concept, given the limited access treatment and clauses which accompany the provisions of many on-line corporate resources).
It was not until 1096 that the Roman Papacy felt confident enough to undertake any concerted effort at re-vitalizing their place in the world, but the
Crusades* (which continued until 1270 AD), even in failing their objective to reclaim the
Holy Land, did re-open Europe to the cultures of the world, and also sparked the trade which made the rise of a new
merchant class possible in
Italy. The
Islamic world, in the meantime, had introduced
pulp paper to Europe through its
occupation of Spain, and the general reverence in that culture for learning and the written word meant the Libraries in the Near East were still very well preserved. The
Persian vizier Abdul Kassem Isbaid (938-995 AD) is said to have traveled nowhere in his land without his personal library, some 17, 000 volumes, which were borne by a caravan of 400
camels, trained to walk in order so as to maintain the alphabetical order of the collection.
Pulp paper being fairly light and durable, bound into book format, permitted for the development of this unique kind of
bibliomania, and more importantly allowed for the easier storage and transport of vast stores of knowledge when necessary. In Europe, for example, as
trade later increased and
city states in Italy began to expand, the repositories of knowledge for so long cloistered away in distant monasteries began to appear in the libraries of newly constructed
cathedrals, added to collections of
secular material. Finally, as a middle class of traders and noblemen began to expand in its influence, education beyond the confines of religion returned as a priority, and
universities began to appear in Italy, France and Germany, supporting studies in law, medicine and philosophy. It was around this time
banking also developed, again requiring careful documentation and meticulously-kept accounting, so that by the 1300s a thirst for knowledge and spirit of exchange has spread throughout the West.
Note:
* Historians and more recently
novelists, interested in the development of
information, have put forward the hypothesis or interpretation that the
Crusades can in fact be viewed as a concerted effort by the
Roman Catholic Church to regain not the simply the
territory, but rather the
intellectual property contained in the
Holy Land during this period (besides providing Europe with much needed economic stimulus)- and can therefore be loosely considered the first, and arguably most protracted
Information War- even if Europe eventually abandoned the effort in 1270 AD. Certainly the recapture of the Royal Library in
Constantinople would be another example. See Schottloher's
Books and the Western World (McFarland: London, 1989) p. 25