Read Ebook: Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13 1894 by Clark John Willis

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 56 lines and 10578 words, and 2 pages

Humbler scholars had to content themselves with small cupboards constructed in the thickness of the wall, or hung against it, as in the picture I will next shew you, from a French translation of Valerius Maximus, copied for King Edward the Fourth, and dated 1479. You will observe that the lower part of the window is fitted with trellises as in the French king's library, not casements. The upper part only is glazed.

Sometimes this book-cupboard supported a revolving desk, which could be raised or depressed by the help of a central screw--like those I shewed you just now; sometimes the desk alone appears, with books laid on it. The forms given to these pieces of furniture by the ingenuity of those who made them are infinite; and they often include beautiful designs for armchairs, fitted with desks for writing. I will shew you just one--not because it is specially beautiful, but because it gives a quaint picture of a scholar's room at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

Here Time--as represented by yonder clock--holds up his finger and bids me stop. I would fain have shewn you more pictures--but I hope that you have seen a sufficient number to give you some idea of the surroundings in which our forefathers read and wrote. I am sure that only in this way can we realise that they were real living people--not mere names. Their modes of thought were far different from ours; they may have wasted their time in verbal subtleties, and uncritical tales; but the more we study what they did, the more we shall realise how laborious, how artistic, how conscientious they were; and amid all the developments of the nineteenth century, we shall gratefully confess that the Middle Ages rocked the cradle of our knowledge, and that we "See but their hope become reality."

CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY C.J. CLAY, M.A. & SONS, AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.

Cambridge University Press.

Seeley and Co.

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet