No Cheese Please

Summary

Libraries​ were all the rage in Renaissance Europe, and no wonder. Theatres of knowledge, grandly decorated and proudly displayed, they hosted dramas of many kinds. Learned men used them for lively conversation on such irresistible topics as the philosophies of Hermes, Zoroaster and Pythagoras or relations between the later Roman Empire and the Persian king Shapur II, which Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and others debated in the new Florentine library of San Marco. Yet they were also – or were supposed to be – places of quiet, intensive study. When the French jurist and antiquarian Claude Bellièvre visited the Vatican Library around 1514, he copied down a papal edict: readers must not quarrel, make noise or ‘cross the desks [to which books were chained] and tear them up with their feet’. Violators were threatened with permanent expulsion – the fate that befell the legendary polymath Pico when some of the theses he proposed for public debate were condemned. He had to return the books he had borrowed, along with their chains, before he fled the city. Happily, Lorenzo de’ Medici helped him take refuge in Florence, where he could slake his bibliomania in San Marco.What made libraries so exciting? They were hardly novelties. Roman writers like Cicero and the two Plinies assembled rich collections of books in their city houses and country villas. Cicero wrote warmly of his librarian, Tyrannio, who put his books into order, and set the second half of his dialogues On the Ends of Good and Evil in the family library of his young friend Lucullus, which he hoped would equip the boy for public life. Medieval monks were fervent bibliophiles. In their cupboards, worn, faded manuscripts of the Latin classics and the Church Fathers flanked brand new Bibles and commentaries, beautifully written and glowing with rich pigments and gold leaf. Spectres of lost collections glimmered alluringly in the background – above all, the Alexandrian Library, famous for both its size and i...