The Archives and Library
A History of the Book in 20 Books from the Cathedral’s Collections
Books have played a central role in the life of Canterbury Cathedral since its foundation. Books were brought to Canterbury with the mission of St Augustine in 597AD; the St Augustine Gospels, now held by Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, is thought to have been one of them. Both the Cathedral Priory and St Augustine’s Abbey became centres of book production in the Middle Ages. The monks of both religious houses spent much of their time in study, and the monasteries built up very extensive libraries. After the Reformation, the Cathedral continued to be a centre of scholarship and learning.
The collections of the Cathedral Archives and Library are ideally placed to tell the story of the book in the West, starting with the arrival of St Augustine and the development of monasticism, and continuing right to the present day. This series, launched on World Book Day 2021, aims to tell some of that story.
1: The Anglo-Saxon Bible
The earliest book in the Cathedral’s collections
Author: Cressida Williams, Archives and Library Manager
Books provide some of the richest evidence for the early medieval art of the British Isles. Production of texts called for extraordinary skills: those of the calligrapher writing the script and of the artist creating the decoration or ‘illumination’.
2: the St Paul’s Epistles from St Augustine’s Abbey
The Norman Conquest's impact on book production
Author: Pietro Mocchi, PhD candidate, University of Kent
The Norman Conquest was a turning point in English history. It brought long-lasting social, political and cultural changes. Even before then, there had been networks of book circulation between Anglo-Saxon England and the Continent, in particular France and Flanders.
3: Glossed Books
The era of scholasticism
Author: Pietro Mocchi, PhD candidate, University of Kent
The previous post examined an early, experimental stage in the development of glosses in medieval books. The volume considered here (DCc/LitMs/A/13) is a later specimen, which displays a more consolidated version of glossing.
4: The Book of Hours
Devotional books for the laity
Author: Cressida Williams, Archives and Library Manager
The previous article in this series examined the practice of glossing in medieval scholarly texts. We will now turn to the best-known and most popular type of medieval manuscript book, the ‘Book of Hours’.
5: ‘The Ploughman from Bohemia’, printed in Gutenberg’s type
The Cathedral Library’s oldest printed item
Author: David Shaw, Cathedral Library volunteer
The Cathedral Library’s oldest printed item is a single leaf printed in a typeface attributed to Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of printing, which had been used to print an edition of the Bible produced in Bamberg in around 1459.
6: The Nuremberg Chronicle
1800 woodcut illustrations in one ambitious project
Author: Fawn Todd, Cathedral Librarian
Some books go by many names. This one is variously known as Die Schedelsche Weltchronik (Schedel’s World Chronicle), and Liber chronicarum (The Book of Chronicles), but is perhaps best known in the English-speaking world as the Nuremberg Chronicle.
7: Aldus Manutius, italic type and small-format books
Cashing in on a new invention
Author: David Shaw, Cathedral Library volunteer
The year 1501 saw an important innovation in the rapidly expanding printing industry. The Venetian printer and bookseller Aldus Manutius (Aldo Manuzio, c. 1450–1515) commissioned an italic typeface from the engraver Francesco Griffo in imitation of the sloping handwriting of contemporary Italian scholars.
8: Martin Luther and the pamphlet war at Wittenberg
Religious movements and print
Author: David Shaw, Cathedral Library volunteer
Everyone knows the story about Martin Luther pinning a copy of his 95 theses to the door of the university church in Wittenberg in 1517, which started a movement leading to the fracturing of the medieval Catholic Church.
9: The Coverdale Bible
The first solo translation of the whole Bible into English
Author: Fawn Todd, Cathedral Librarian
Although perhaps not as glamourous as some of the other volumes in this series, the Coverdale Bible still marks an important point in the history of the book, particularly in England. Translated and printed in Europe in 1535 (with English translations of the Bible still not strictly legal within England at the time), the Coverdale Bible is the first time the entire Bible had been translated into English entirely by the work of one man: Miles Coverdale.
10: The King James Bible
The impact on education, literature, and modern speech
Author: Fawn Todd, Cathedral Librarian
Few books in the history of the English language can claim, as the King James Bible can, to have had such an impact on the daily lexicon of the public over 400 years after it was first printed.
11: Shakespeare’s Second Folio
Annotations and oddities in a literary giant
Author: Fawn Todd, Cathedral Librarian
It’s rather difficult to avoid mentioning Shakespeare when putting together any list of influential works, so his inclusion here should come as no surprise for bibliophiles! Our beloved copy of Shakespeare’s works held here at the Cathedral (CCL H/O-4-24) is a Second Folio edition, and one which holds no small number of surprises: it is a book of alterations, annotations, and unexpected appearances of famous poets.
12: Turner’s Herball and the importance of visual accuracy
A matter of life or death: The importance of clear images
Author: Fawn Todd, Cathedral Librarian
Detailed and exact images (photo-manipulation aside) are something we rather take for granted in modern day life, however with early printed images at least a level of artistic interpretation was commonly expected. Some works though demanded highly accurate images: a perfect example of this is William Turner’s Herball (CCL H/G-3-20), which was printed in London in 1551.
13: Book gifting and ancient languages in 17th century Canterbury
William Somner, studies, and his circle of friends
Author: David Shaw, Cathedral Library volunteer
One of the major scholarly figures of mid-seventeenth century Canterbury was William Somner (1606–1669), a registrar of the Consistory Court before the Civil War and also Auditor (chapter clerk) to the Cathedral after the Restoration.