The Anatomy of Bibliography - Illinois

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credibility that makes us patient with its systems; its arcane erudition can be a
bully. Some bibliographers may be left in tears, not always rightly. (Others
learn not to care, not always rightly.) Their works often become eponymous,
but their motives and decisions are most often known only in their works. In
whatever form their work takes, they will always attract readers who delight in
discovering new things to read. I hope they will be stimulated.
SOURCES
§1. BOCCACCIO AT MONTE CASSINO. The
legend was largely forgotten until the nineteenth
century, and has rarely been cited in the
twentieth. Did these events ever happen? Luigi
Tosti, in his Storia della Badia di Monte-Cassino
(1853; vol. 3, pp. 97-99), has doubts. (But does his
love for his monastery undermine his credibility?)
Benvenuto, was a devoted student of Boccaccio,
but Boccaccio himself is not known to have either
confirmed or denied the legend.
Browsing turned up this story: many years ago,
I stumbled onto Sandys, who led to Longfellow,
with no clues that I would ever wish to remember
the story. Boccaccio’s role in preserving Tacitus is
well known, and scholars agree: he did not that
day filch what may be the greatest of all Tacitus
manuscripts and take it to Florence, where it is
now Mediceo-Laurenziana 68,2.
§2. THE ANGEL OF ST. ELOI. The only
known copy is in the Bibliothèque Mazarine, Ms
4056, as cited in Auguste Molinier, Catalogue des
manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Mazarine (1890), vol. 3,
p. 267. It is reproduced in Alfred Franklin, Les
anciennes bibliothèques de Paris (1873), vol. 3, facing
p. 7; in Giuseppe Boffito, Scrittori barnabiti
(Olschki, 1934), vol. 3, p. 49; and in the Histoire de
l’édition française, vol. 2: Les Bibliothèques sous l’ancien
régime, 1530–1789 (Promodis, 1988), p. 348.
This Barnabite congregation was of the order of
Saint Eloi (patron saint of goldsmiths, thus
perhaps of engravers and punch cutters as well),
founded in Milan in 1629. Suppressed during the
Revolution, the Paris congregation was
reconstituted in 1865. It is pleasant to imagine
this library as the working collection for a noted
Barnabite, Jean-Pierre Nicéron, author of a
bibliographical landmark of the Enlightenment,
the Mémoirs pour servir à l’'histoire des hommes
illustres dans la république des lettres, avec un catalogue
raisonné de leurs ouvrages (1727–45).
But are we really looking at an angel (where are
the wings), or a muse (or an angel with wings
hidden so as to look like a muse), or perhaps only
a scribe? And what is he or she doing: copying a
text, citing it, annotating it? Is the library not in
fact merely an allegory of the world of
knowledge: did the library in St. Eloi actually
look like this, with those exact titles on the
shelves? Angels, like God, move in mysterious
ways. My case for an angel copying a citation
must rest on two facts: (1) the scene appears in
the catalogue of a religious library, and (2)
catalogues are the work of angels who do what is
pleasing in the sight of God. Not a strong case in
general, except to those with a strong faith in
bibliography.
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