A Companion to the History of the Book (86 page)

Taking Oaths upon the Book

Medieval practice allowed a contract to be sworn in front of witnesses, upon relics or upon books. Even when recourse to properly constituted law courts was possible, details of legal transactions, especially the transfer of property to the Church, might be entered into a Gospel book or service book. The transaction was thus sanctioned by the full weight of religious authority. As late as c.1200, the administrators of St. Augustine’s, Canterbury copied details of tenants, churches, and rents into a Gospel book. In late twelfth-century England, an oath taken upon a service book was challenged, it being held that kneeling before the Gospels was the correct procedure. This was certainly the case by the fifteenth century. Fear of divine retribution was a potent force against perjury.

Coronation oaths taken before the peers of the realm and parliament were not dependent upon any book, but the
Book of Oaths
of 1649 indicates that swearing “by the holy contents of this book,” with a hand on the Bible, was usual practice by this date. Exceptions caused a stir. In 1657, Dr. Owen, Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, refused to be sworn as a witness by laying his right hand on the Bible and kissing it afterwards; legal opinion declared his oath invalid. When a Massachusetts colonist, Samuel Sewell, took the oath of allegiance in 1686, he held the book in his left hand, holding the right hand up to heaven, to the consternation of lawyers present. A German visitor seeking to use the Bodleian Library in 1710 was surprised to have to touch a Greek New Testament with his right hand and then kiss the book – an English postulant would perhaps have remarked only on the language of the sacred text (Spurr 2001). James Tyler’s work on oaths of 1834 insisted that kissing the thumb and not the book made an oath invalid. William Congreve’s play of 1700,
The Way of the World,
made use of this: when Mincing has to swear not to disclose what she has seen in the blue garret, she is clever enough to see that she is being asked to swear not on a Bible but on a book of poems. Kissing Bibles was deemed unhygienic by the end of the nineteenth century: on the advice of the medical profession, an act of 1909 discontinued the practice (Stringer 1910: 84).

Books that Boast

It is easily said that individuals invested in books by way of illustration, ornament, or binding as a matter of prestige, as an aspiration, in order to establish themselves at an elevated point in a real or imagined social hierarchy. The theme is not always easy to document. Was investment in a beautifully illuminated Book of Hours a matter of social rivalry or a recognition that the cycle of prayer supported by such books, and the contact with the Almighty involved, deserved only the most expensive materials and workmanship? In the latter case, the embellishment was an act of piety, not display. There are certainly indications, however, that such books were intended to impress in public arenas. The fourteenth-century poet Eustache Deschamps (1346–1406) famously teased wealthy housewives of Paris for needing to appear in church with expensively decorated Books of Hours, and there are similar derogatory remarks about using prayer-books as a fashion accessory at later dates. Certainly, such books included more texts toward 1500 that were relevant for services in church rather than in private. When the covers of books used the same materials and ornament as contemporary fashions, we can assume that display was as significant as text. This was as true of the gorgeous textiles on the c.1400 binding of the Hours of the French queen, Isabel of Bavaria, as it was of the chaste black leather favored by ladies of Jansenist sympathies for similar books at Louis XIV’s court.

The non-textual role of books such as these is underlined by the fact that they were kept not in libraries but as fashion accessories – as appears in the famous illuminated genealogy of the kings of Spain and Portugal by Simon Bening of 1530–34, where a Book of Hours appears in a box with rosaries and jewels as the accoutrements of a princess. From their appearance as independent texts in the thirteenth century, Books of Hours or similar devotional prayer-books became a standard sign of piety. The Virgin was commonly shown with such a book, and the clasping of books of this kind was the standard way of representing piety at a later date. In Protestant England, the descendants of Thomas More had themselves painted by Rowland Lockey in the late sixteenth century with such books in their hands as a sign of continued loyalty to the Church of Rome.

Non-textual Uses of Libraries

Discussing the later Middle Ages, Armando Petrucci (1988) made a useful distinction between libraries that were intended for the distraction of their owners and those that were built up as an adjunct of power. The most prominent example of the latter was the library of Charles V of France (reigned 1364–80) who commissioned translations of authoritative texts of the medieval and classical past as a conscious policy to legitimate the new Valois dynasty. The works underpinned the ideology of royal government, one promoted by a corps of university-trained administrators. Many of these works have illustrated frontispieces that show the translator handing over the completed work to the king, placing the intellectual capital of the past under his protection.

As an attribute of state power, libraries such as this suffered the fortunes of the state in question. When Charles VIII of France conquered Naples in 1496, his opponent, King Alfonso II, took as much of the royal library as he could to the safety of Ischia. The French king was able to send over a thousand volumes back to France. Louis XII defeated the Sforza duke of Milan in 1499: almost half of the ducal library was removed from Pavia to the royal collection in Blois, the remainder being made available for the king’s companions in arms. Both kings profited from the habit of Italian princes in developing libraries as acts of magnificence to broadcast their position as the heirs of ancient Rome. The memoirs of the Florentine bookseller Vespasiano da Bisticci make clear the role of libraries as instruments of prestige and conspicuous consumption for Renaissance potentates, even if we are less clear about the social rituals associated with them. We know that Borso d’Esté paraded his magnificent Bible, illuminated by the most expensive illuminators of the land, as he journeyed to Rome in 1471 to receive the title of duke of Ferrara – this and a number of other works were given special luxury bindings and covers for the purpose.

Manifest signs of mastery of the intellectual and religious worlds encapsulated in books were necessary adjuncts for an effective display of power. Angelo Decembrio, the humanist servant of the future lord of Ferrara, described preparations for a reception given by his master in 1438 in the library of one of his courtiers: the aim was to upstage Florentine guests. The floor was strewn with cut flowers and the young prince gave a disquisition upon Terence and Donatus: the books were a setting that enabled the host to display literary refinement and total mastery of classical scholarship. The library of Federico da Motefeltro, lord of Urbino, in his palace at Gubbio had a similar role: from the 1470s it was open to the public, and the magnificently bound volumes were regularly shown to guests, ambassadors, and scholars, a crucial tool in the cultural politics and political maneuverings of its creator. Similar ambition was evidenced by François I when in August 1546 he treated English ambassadors to a discourse about his Greek books, bound in the new
alia greca
fashion from Italy, even though he knew none of the language.

The self-conscious development of libraries as physical expressions of their owner’s relation to the intellectual capital of the day is something that has its own history. At what time does it become normal for the palaces of princes, the stately homes of aristocrats, and the manors of the gentry classes to include libraries that functioned on the same basis as other apartments? It is striking that Castiglione’s
Book of the Courtier
first published in 1528 asks his courtier to be learned but almost to eschew contact with books. Sixteenth-century portraiture certainly confirms that courtiers, aristocrats, and gentlemen in general signified their social position by dress: books on the whole denoted those who needed them professionally, that is to say academics, clerics, or pedants. Henry Peachman’s
Compleat Gentleman
(1622) likewise advises aspirant gentlemen not to be seen reading: learning was better developed by conversing with the learned. He refers to libraries amassed for show as a substitute for learning. Books that had too much gilding “for ostentation sake,” he likened to “prayer books of girls and gallants which are carried to the church but for their outsides.” However, he does recommend having those books that
were
owned by a gentleman properly bound and annotated by the owner to show that they had been studied.

Books and Ornament

From the mid-fifteenth century, technological advances made decoration of run-of-the-mill books possible. Stamps, plaques, and rolls allowed covers to be decorated at little cost. From the 1470s, Italian binders imitated the Islamic practice of tooling gold onto leather, and this was taken up in northern Europe shortly before 1510. The design repertoire was largely peculiar to bindings, but the advent of strapwork and arabesque designs from the 1530s shows an effort to match ornament used for other articles: strapwork, in particular, could be found in the decoration of François I’s Fontainbleau palace and on St. Porchaire ceramics, for example.

Any private library at this date was liable to be a collective resource, so that books needed to impress the friends of the owner. The French collector Jean Grolier had the words
lo. Grolierii et amicorum
impressed on his bindings; Willibald Pirkheimer (1470– 1530) had a similar phrase on the bookplate Durer designed for him. Books here appear as the physical manifestation of the cult of friendship and intellectual solidarity cultivated among humanistic scholars. Gabriel Naudé’s 1627 publication about libraries assumed them to be accessible to a public beyond their owners. Lavish binding signaled that the object was worthy of respect and claimed homage from its users.

Books had always been used as gifts, though before the fifteenth century it is probably fair to say that the typical gift was from a potentate to the Church. By the Renaissance, scholars sought employment or favors by offering books to potential patrons. Deluxe books could be exchanged between rulers. Cosimo de’ Medici had no qualms in sending, for example, a text of Livy corrected by Petrarch to the king of Naples in 1444. If in 1456 Francesco Sforza, duke of Milan, was advised that a horse might be a better present to the king of France than a book, later French kings were avid collectors of magnificent volumes.

In the nineteenth century, books were mass produced specifically to be offered as gifts. Companies like Alfred Mame in Tours and Martial Ardant in Limoges, from the 1850s, used the new-found ability of machines to block colorful designs onto cloth boards to create books intended as gifts at baptism, confirmation, and marriage, as well as school prizes and Christmas presents. Many surviving copies appear virtually unread. Similar books found a ready market in England, the covers broadcasting the taste and artistic culture of giver and recipient. John Ruskin was critical: of a gift book represented in Holman Hunt’s
Awakening Conscience
(1854), he referred to “embossed books, vain and useless, they also [like the furniture of the house] new, marked with no happy wearing of the beloved leaves.” Such books might be given singly or in sets. John Murray around 1848 marketed a set of small volumes of Byron’s works in a miniature Grecian temple, covered in leather and with glass doors, which could hold its own with other ornaments on the mantelpiece (V&A, National Art Library, 802.AE.0042). In this period as much as in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, decoration gave a non-textual message: it showed investment in what the text represented (scholarship, religious orientation, literary refinement). Decorative binding was a corrective to the banality of the book as an object after the invention of printing.

Books as Interior Decoration

In the sixteenth century, books that were not of the pocket or bedside variety were stored in cupboards or on shelves. If the artistic convention was to show scholars and authors surrounded by carelessly arranged piles of tomes, more ordered settings showed volumes arranged neatly on slanting surfaces in such a way that they added to the decoration of the room or storage space: Carpaccio’s
Vision of St. Augustine,
painted c.1502, is a powerful example. The increase in book production after the invention of printing created problems of storage. Some libraries can be shown to have stored books with their decorative boards showing (the eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Reims is one such, the Leistler bookcase shown at the Great Exhibition in 1851 and now at the V&A is another), but the norm was to line books up on shelves, initially with the fore-edge turned outwards, but from the latter part of the seventeenth century with the spine facing outwards.

A significant development was the free-standing bookcase, where books became furniture. Samuel Pepys famously asked his joiner to construct free-standing bookcases with glass doors, asking his binder to gild the backs of the books in them “to make them handsome.” In the grand houses of the eighteenth century, books could be totally subordinated to schemes of interior design, so that, for instance, Robert Adam would rebind whole libraries on bookcases covering the larger part of the wall surface to present decorated spines as part of a scheme of interior decoration. Perhaps to relieve a potential monotony came the conceit of false spines. A letter in
The Spectator
of April 12, 1711 described such false bindings as a novelty in the library of one Lady Leonora (Joseph Addison was too discreet to give further particulars): there were “several . . . counterfeit books on the upper shelves which were carved in wood and served only to fill up the number, like faggots in the muster of a regiment” (faggots were people paid to stand in for those escaping duty in the militia). The library installed by Viscount Tyrconnel at Belton House, Lincolnshire, in 1721–37 gives us an idea of what might be achieved by lining each wall of a room with volumes that sported gold-tooled labels on the spine. The uprights of the shelving were disguised with false spines made of tooled leather, attached so that the run of spines should seem uninterrupted over the whole surface of the wall – this was strange enough to be commented upon by Simon Yorke, a visitor from Erddig, in the 1740s.