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CONSERVATION and POSTERITY Leonard E Boyle OP

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CONSERVATION and POSTERITY Leonard E Boyle OP CONSERVATION AND POSTERITY Leonard E Boyle OP Thirty-five years or so ago, when I first began doing amateur archaeological work at San Clemente, I uncovered a mosaic pavement in the lower church which had been hidden from view for a very long time. However, I was taken to task by one of my Dominican colleagues, a long-time resident of San Clemente. According to him, I should not have uncovered the pavement. I should have left it as it was, unseen, in order to preserve it for posterity. On the spur of the moment I hazarded, "Posterity? But are we not also posterity?" Happily, that pavement, carefully railed off, is still on view today for the present generation of posterity. Happily, too, I have stuck to my conviction that posterity is a bit of a myth - or, rather that the only tangible posterity is the present. I must admit, all the same, that I had not thought much about it again until recently. Ten years ago I came to the Vatican Library after almost twenty-five years of teaching Latin Palaeography at Toronto, and discovered very shortly that there was some problem about allowing students in the School of Palaeography access to manuscripts, on the grounds that the Library had a duty to preserve its holdings for posterity. While I sympathized with this preoccupation, as a teacher of palaeography and a user rather than a preserver of manuscripts, I was more than a little disconcerted . This was all the more so, because I had always presumed that one of the great advantages of having a school of palaeography in the precincts of the Vatican Library was precisely the 2 Leonard Boyle availability of manuscripts to students. When, for example, I was a student at Oxford, it was the fact that all of us could spend much time in the Bodleian Library on manuscript work that really gave life and depth to the course in palaeography which we were taking under N R Ker. At Toronto there was little such possibility, though at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, where I taught, we had three or four manuscripts at our disposal (which, I must add, had been acquired not because of any intrinsic value but precisely in order to expose the students of palaeography in some way to live manuscripts). The fact that palaeography was taught at all at Toronto was a source of mystification if not of amusement to many of my European colleagues who time and again would ask me, "How can you possibly teach palaeography when there is not a library of manuscripts to hand?" The point was made forcefully - too forcefully perhaps - in an interview given to the Gazette du livre in 1983 by Armando Petrucci, when, after a six-week seminar at the Newberry Library in Chicago, he reflected not very favourably on the possibilities for palaeographical studies and studies on book-production in the United States (but not, I hasten to add, in Canada), and concluded that if one were really serious about studying the mediaeval book one should go off to Europe, to some great deposit of manuscripts such as the British Library, the Bibliotheque nationale, the libraries in Florence, the Vatican Library. Now, I find myself, for the first time in my life as a teacher of palaeography, not only with a great library of manuscripts to hand but also with a school of palaeography next door, of which, as I discovered, I was one of the directors. Here surely, if Petrucci meant anything, was an optimal situation for students, and one in fact which I do not think is to be found elsewhere. Yet, if the policy of "preserving for posterity" were to be maintained in their respect, they would be as well off, if not better off, at Toronto or some other such place in North America. All of this, and my experience as an amateur archaeologist, has caused me to reflect, however superficially, on the problem of conservation and on the slogan, and it probably is no more than that, of "preserving for posterity." Conservation and Posterity 3 Actually, I think it better to begin from the past, since what is really meant by "preserving for posterity" is not "preserving what we have in the present for posterity" but "preserving for posterity what the present has inherited from the past." What we have today from the past is often the result of fortuitous transmission. Yes, there were libraries in cathedral centres and monasteries and royal houses of various periods, say of the Middle Ages, and a few, all too few, of these have come down to us more or less intact. But in the days before collectors and collections, these libraries generally were put together for the use of monks and scholars, not for prestige or display - nor indeed with an eye on "posterity" in the distant sense. If, as in the case of Cassiodorus, there were sporadic attempts to collect, this was not necessarily in terms of the future: it was largely in terms of recovering from the past for the sake of the present. It is unnecessary here to speak of losses from the past. They are well known. Wars and rebellions and changes of religion have taken their toll. One instance will suffice. After the dissolution of the monasteries in England, many local families acquired manuscripts either because these were available for the taking or might come in useful one day. Thus in the 1640s, during the Puritan period in England, a local Anglican clergyman called Stump had a goodly collection of manuscripts from the great abbey of Malmesbury. His sons were soldiers, and used the leaves of these manuscripts to scour their guns. He himself, when he brewed a barrel of special ale, was accustomed to plug the bung-hole with a manuscript sheet. Nothing, he used to say, did it so well. I suppose that nothing survives from those Malmesbury manuscripts, once in the hands of the Stump family. But other manuscripts, put to not dissimilar uses, luckily have survived, and from even a more distant past. I am thinking particularly of the Lateran Livy, now in the Vatican Library (Vat. lat. 10696) - of those seven pieces of parchment forming a leaf and a half in uncial script of the fourth or fifth century, which were found almost a hundred years ago at San Giovanni in Laterano in a cypress box made to the order 4 Leonard Boyle of Pope Leo Ill (795-816), where they were crumpled up to act as "envelopes" to preserve relics from the Holy Land. This is fortuitous preservation indeed. But it is preservation, and must be respected as such. Hence, as I see it, the first duty of conservation is to respect the past that has given us whatever we are now occupied with preserving. By this I mean that the origin and provenance of a given item must be faithfully recognized and recorded. However accidental the transmission, or however much it may amuse or amaze us, we have to thank it for what we have. The Livy from the Sancta Sanctorum at S. Giovanni should be known as such, even when inserted, as in the Vatican Library, in a continuing series such as Vaticani latini. This is not simply a question of recording the names of benefactors. It is a question of how the present and the future have been enriched from the past. There are some seventy thousand literary manuscripts, as distinct from about eighty thousand archival volumes, in the Vatican Library. The main holdings have been respected - Barberini, Chigi, Ottoboni, Palatini, Reginenes, Urbinates, etc. - but the Vaticani latini series conceals a goodly number - at least 100 - of lesser provenances, and perhaps does not do full justice to that past which has transmitted them to us today. Obviously it would be impossible to treat each one of these as a fondo, but there should be some way under the Vaticani latini umbrella of at least keeping the fondi intact, and not, as has happened on occasion, breaking them up, or mingling items from one fondo with another. As a general rule, collections should not be tampered with, no matter how recent their past or how haphazard their content. That a given item has at all survived may be entirely due to its chance inclusion in a collection. The Getty Museum in Malibu, California, has a magnificent programme in conservation and is indeed a leading exponent of the art in many subjects. It has also made some noteworthy purchases of manuscript collections, such as the entire Ludwig collection of illuminated manuscripts from Aachen which it acquired in 1983, just after a fine three-volume catalogue of the collection had been published. Without Mr and Mrs Ludwig, many of these manuscripts might not have survived to the present or the future. Yet, because some of these Conservation and Posterity 5 manuscripts, mostly of the ninth and tenth centuries, are not in fact illuminated, they have been put on the market by the Getty Museum, as not being worthy of preservation there with the others of the Ludwig collection. Perhaps standard accounts of conservation should now be amended to allow for a chapter entitled "Selling as Conservation?" Selling manuscripts is not necessarily evil. It all depends on how necessary it is and how trivial or misplaced the reasons. But if a sale is justifiable, one should at least act responsibly. In this day and age, when conservation is a sacred word, and much invoked in library circles, especially in North America, it is jarring to find that since 1962 the Houghton Library at Harvard has been donating or selling off, in bits and pieces the Iranian masterpiece Shah-Nameh {Book of Kings), a sixteenth-century manuscript of 759 folios, including 258 folios with miniatures, the latest sale being that of fourteen folios at Christie's in London a short while ago.
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