32 - The library of Alcuin’s York

Summary

Where books are kept

Small roofs hold the gifts of heavenly wisdom;

Reader, learn them, rejoicing with a devout heart.

The Wisdom of the Lord is better than any treasures

For the one who pursues it now will have the pathway of light.

York’s remarkable eighth-century library supported a school of European renown. By the third quarter of the ninth century, the school had long since faded from prominence, and the books that had not been dispersed were probably destroyed during struggles with Danish invaders. The library’s floruit had spanned a mere few decades – the careers of two teachers. The evidence for the accumulation, contents and character of the books collected at York differs significantly from the evidence available for the libraries of Canterbury and Wearmouth-Jarrow: vivid obiter dicta from letters and a handful of poems that lend themselves more easily to sketching a portrait in a landscape – albeit one in chiaroscuro – than to reconstructing a precise catalogue. Yet the evidence for York Minster’s library might just as aptly be compared to a long beam of light as to materials for a portrait, for it illuminates not just library history, but early medieval intellectual history and the social world of a unique book collection and of learning more generally – and this, almost entirely from the distinctive perspective of a single individual, Alcuin of York (d. 804).

Alcuin would be remembered as ‘the most learned man anywhere to be found’ or as ‘a man most learned in every field’. His learning drew students to the school of York from Ireland, and even from the Continent. It also led the great Frankish ruler Charlemagne to enlist him as an advisor. And so Alcuin spent the second half of his life in Francia, first at Charlemagne’s court and later at Tours, where from 796 he served as abbot and continued to teach.