Of books and millennia
The other week I was the guest of the Librarian's Christian Fellowship at Winchester, where I was to give the LCF annual lecture (on Knowledge in the IT age, a theme you may have heard me expand on before in these pages). The Fellowship had arranged for its members and guests to be entertained in the morning by a guided tour of Winchester Cathedral Library.
Every time I go to Winchester - a mere half hour's drive from my home - I wonder why I don't go more often. After the guided tour I wondered why I had never visited the Cathedral Library before. The gift of a seventeenth-century Bishop who donated his large library to the diocese, it's housed in an ancient room built on to the Cathedral for that purpose. The books sit in stately rows on carved shelves, a pair of library globes that have sat in the room for centuries dominating the floor.
Visiting such a place prompts all sorts of reflections. Not least, the curiosity one has in inspecting anybody's books, for what it tells you about that person and their interests. The erudite bishop who bequeathed this collection was a man of wide tastes and much learning. His library is still used by scholars, which would no doubt have pleased him enormously. From such libraries we learn a great deal. We know the contents of the libraries of several Puritan and Independent ministers so we know that their reading was a good deal less narrow than we might have thought. Baxter's knowledge of Catholic meditation was not got by hearsay, for example, and libraries such as that of Bishop Hall of Oxford contain some surprises. Such library catalogues have been important in establishing the nature of Puritan thought, its sources and influences.
