An Introduction to The Arcadian Library 1 by Dr Robert ... - Wolfsberg

An Introduction to The Arcadian Library 1
by Dr Robert Jones
1. The symbol of the Arcadian Library is the Lily of the Valley, a plant that
provides good groundcover in the shade of the mulberry trees of the Levant.
I want to begin by thanking UBS very warmly on behalf of the Arcadian
Library, its chairman and staff, for inviting us to show you a small selection of
antiquarian books in an exhibition at this conference and giving us the
opportunity to talk a little about the library, its relevance and its work. In
particular, we are grateful to Katja Perrotto, Rea Reichen and Dr Karolina
Jeftic for their excellent work and kindness, to Dr Toni Schönenberger for his
direction and hospitality here at Wolfsberg, and to Alain Robert for his
foresight in masterminding the occasion. It is the good relationship between
Alain and the Chairman of the Arcadian Library, and above all the imaginative
understanding that they both share of the inspirational role of cultural history
in our lives that has made this collaboration so positive. And what a
remarkable forum Wolfsberg is. On Tuesday evening it was a real pleasure to
meet leading librarians and other book enthusiasts from the region at the
German vernissage.
The exhibition here in Wolfsberg follows on from a larger show in London that
we put on in the first quarter of this year at the Brunei Gallery in London
University’s School of Oriental and African Studies, when UBS were also in
support.
2. Having Mr Tim Stanley and Dr Jan Loop here tonight to talk a little
about the Arcadian Library is a great bonus. Tim Stanley combines a highly
specialised skill in the field of Islamic codicology, that is to say the study of
manuscripts from the Islamic world, with a deep knowledge of the wider
historical issues concerning the art and culture of the Middle East. We are
really grateful to you for taking time off from your duties at the Victoria and
Albert Museum to speak for Arcadian at UBS. I am also particularly pleased to
have Dr Loop here from London University’s Warburg Institute where he has

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played a key part in the very recent creation of a unique Centre for the History
of Arabic Studies in Europe, known by the acronym CHASE.
It was some 30 years ago as an aspiring postgraduate student at that same
institution that I began my own investigation of European knowledge of the
Arabic language and its literature at the time of the Renaissance. But life has
changed irrevocably in this period: what had seemed somewhat tangential,
even obscure, back in those days has now come to be regarded as having
much wider implications not only among academics but for the wider world:
the background history to the East-West Interface has become a key issue in
today’s world.
3. The Arcadian Library is a private collection mainly consisting of some
10,000 volumes of European antiquarian books relating to the Arab and
Islamic world, but also containing prints and drawings, documents, and some
important Islamic manuscript material. The library owes its existence to the
vision of its chairman and to his family’s inspired approach to preserving and
promoting the cultural heritage of the Levant and in particular its interaction
with the West. What better vantage point from which to observe the history of
the ups and downs of the East West relationship than a rare book library
The Arcadian Library holds a mass of detailed information on many aspects of
this relationship that is of great interest to specialised academics who attend
the seminars and lectures that we hold.
On this occasion, a group of scholars spoke about the bindings and the
provenances of the books in the library – and those papers are right now
being developed into a richly illustrated book that will be published in
association with Oxford University Press in April next year. I shall return to our
publications in a moment. Suffice it to say that a remarkable combination of
top quality scholarship with stunning visual presentation is unrivalled by any
other publisher on the history of the East-West subject. Though perhaps Doha
and Abu Dhabi, if they are to live up to the challenges they have set

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themselves and with the massive resources at their disposal, will be hard on
our heals. Standing on the left of the picture is Professor Alastair Hamilton,
our academic advisor and the author of several of our books. It is ten years
since the Arcadian Library created his current post of visiting Arcadian
Professor at London University’s School of Advanced Studies, resident at the
Warburg Institute. Regrettably, he could not be with us today as he is just now
on a visit to some of the Coptic monasteries in Egypt.
Quite apart from their precise historical contents, antiquarian books have
always taken on a symbolic meaning explaining, as it were, why we are where
we are now. It was royalty and the nobility who in the past were the collectors
of these books; and many a country house is enriched by association with the
vision and breadth of mind that their libraries exude. For a visitor such as His
Royal Highness Prince Charles, Prince of Wales, who read History as an
undergraduate at Cambridge and has a special sensitivity for the culture and
arts of Islam, the library holds a deep fascination. He greatly appreciated a
visit he made just three days before his 60 th birthday, on his return to London
after the commemoration of Armistice Day at Verdun with President Sarkozy
on 11 November 2008.
4. Books more than any other medium have the ability to transport us to
another world, to take us back in time to earlier eras when very different sets
of criteria informed and shaped people’s lives. Not that history repeats itself in
any precise way. But some knowledge, at least, of 19 th -century books on
Afghanistan during the period of the so-called Great Game between Britain
and Russia, might, for example, raise awareness of the cultural context of
what we face today.
5. Aside from the combative aspect of our relationship – through the
Crusades, the Islamic conquest of Spain and its eventual fall, the rise and fall
of the Ottoman Empire, the conflicts of the Colonial period – aside from the
aggressions around the Mediterranean Sea and beyond, more than any other
medium, books can show us that there is an immensely productive and

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creative dynamic when East and West resolve or just ignore their differences
and join forces to exchange knowledge and bring about positive change and
understanding. Looking at Pascal Coste’s beautiful views of the mosques of
Cairo, do we really have to regard them as part of a devious conspiracy as
some would have us believe
6. The Arcadian Library has exhibited books at the Institut du Monde
Arabe in Paris, twice at the Brunei Gallery in London, and in 2001, we
mounted a joint exhibition in Antwerp at the Plantin-Moretus Museum. This
wonderful museum of printing history is in the 16 th -century house of the printer
Christophe Plantin, who was greatly interested in the Arab world and whose
son in law, Franciscus Raphelengius, wrote the first Arabic-Latin dictionary to
be printed with Arabic type. The title of the exhibition summed up the rich
melange of influences: Arab Culture and Ottoman Magnificence in Antwerp’s
Golden Age.
7/8. John Ronayne designed and set up the exhibitions in the Brunei
Gallery and here in Wolfsberg. As you see in Antwerp, he completely
transformed the Plantin museum with this installation.
Just two months after 9/11, the exhibition attracted a large audience and
much critical acclaim including the comment by the Financial Times reviewer
who wrote: ‘In a sea of contemporary mistrust, [the Arcadian exhibition] is a
small, clear plea for understanding.’ Perhaps these words express the most
we can expect in terms of relevance from a private library of books. The
Arcadian Library is just that: a small, clear plea for understanding.
Here in 2011 on the wooded shores of Lake Constance, we are in a quite
different milieu to Paris, London or Antwerp. We are just minutes away from
the birthplace at Kesswill of one of the 20 th -century’s most original thinkers,
Carl Gustav Jung;

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9. and we are just an hour’s drive away from Europe’s greatest monastic
library at Sankt Gallen with its inestimable treasure of early medieval
manuscripts. In Sankt Gallen of the 9 th and 10 th centuries the production of the
scriptorium proceeded regardless of any influence from the Arab world,
except perhaps for the anxiety caused by the occasional threat to the Alpine
passes emanating from the Arab stronghold at Fraxinet, in the hinterland of St
Tropez. And in the later Middle Ages there is only the faintest trace in Sankt
Gallen of the Arabic learning that was received in Spain and Sicily and was to
have such a profound effect on the mainstream of European learning from the
11th century to the Renaissance.
I refer, however, to one manuscript in the Stiftsbibliothek in Sankt Gallen that I
had the privilege of inspecting yesterday.
10. Codex 837 is a composite of different texts: it contains an Aristotelian
work (not, incidentally, the lost second book of the Poetics made famous in
the novel by Umberto Eco!). The manuscript also contains the work of three
9 th -century philosophers, al-Kindi, Qusta ibn Luqa and Isaac ben Salomon
Israili, a Muslim, a Christian and a Jew, all of whom wrote in Arabic, were
translated to Latin, and are preserved thus in the Sankt Gallen manuscript.
The significance for European learning of these Arabic texts is precisely the
kind of thing that excites us at the Arcadian Library; and Tim Stanley will
allude to some of the remarkable manuscript material preserved there.
One very direct link that I should mention between Wolfsberg and the history
of European interest in Islam is as follows.
11. In the UBS art collection, there are the two portraits of the two
reformers, Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, from the workshop of
Lucas Cranach the Younger. They hang in the main chateau. Jan Loop will be
mentioning these reformers in his talk as they both provided prefaces for the
first printing of the Qur’an in Latin, issued at Basel in 1543. The Arcadian

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copy, once owned by a 17 th -century English ambassador to Constantinople,
Sir William Trumbull, is exhibited here in Wolfsberg.
12. The exhibition here in Wolfsberg sets out to do three things:
First: to give you a taste of the ambience of the Arcadian Library, on the
ground and first floors or the Parquin House there are static graphic panels of
books and digi-frame displays of many images from the books, as well as a
20 minute film based entirely on rare books entitled The Arabian Gulf in a
World Context.
Second: in the inner sanctum of the basement, we display a few examples of
rare items from each of the six major subject areas of our holdings – Travel,
Turcica, Science and Medicine, Islam and Christianity, Arab Spain,
Scholarship and Literature.
13. Third: on the first floor, we display the work we are doing to promote
the contents of the library in association with Oxford University Press. You will
be able to browse through the books and see their design and content. Eight
titles have been issued to date, three more are now being prepared to go to
press, and many more are envisaged. Here are just some examples.
This book concerns a seventeenth-century French diplomat and gifted linguist
who was the first to render the Qur’an into French.
14. This book analyses for the first time the illustrators of the Arabian
Nights in famous European editions. The book is richly illustrated.
15. This book looks at Aleppo through the eyes of two seventeenth-century
Scottish physicians.
16. Copies of the book Bridge of Knowledge have been distributed to your
rooms. On the screen here is what you will see if you take off the jacket of the

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book, unfold it, and look at the inside: it is a panoramic view of the temple of
the sun and colonnade at Palmyra by a mid-19 th century artist who travelled
from the Gulf up the Euphrates to Syria.
As you will see, Bridge of Knowledge goes far beyond what we were able to
display here or in London: it is in fact an intellectual and visual tour of the
entire library. We do hope you will enjoy it and that you will want to enrich
your own libraries by purchasing the other books that we publish with Oxford
University Press.
17. I am going to close with a puzzle. This is a grammar book in Arabic
about the Arabic language. It was printed in Rome in 1592. It mimics the style
and layout of an Arabic manuscript, even to the extent of having a Bismillah at
the head. It is unvocalised. That is to say it has none of the diacritical marks
that would allow a novice to read the book. It is unreadable for a non-Arabic
reader. Only by knowing the grammar of Arabic can you understand the
correct vocalisation and read and understand the grammatical rules the book
contains. So, though this book contains the key to understanding its contents,
the key has so to speak been locked up inside it. What is the purpose of this
book