Middle English Literature

Of showing due propriety in the custody of books.
We are not only rendering service to God in preparing volumes of new
books but also exercising an office of sacred piety when we treat books
carefully and again when we restore them to their proper places and com-
mend them to inviolable custody that they may rejoice in purity while we
have them in our hands and rest securely when they are put back in their
repositories. And surely next to the vestments and vessels dedicated to
the Lord’s body, holy books deserve to be rightly treated by the clergy, to
which great injury is done so often as they are touched by unclean hands.
Wherefore, we deem it expedient to warn our students of various negligences,
which might always be easily avoided and do wonderful harm to books.
And in the first place, as to the opening and closing of books, let there be
due moderation that they be not unclasped in precipitate haste nor, when
we have finished our inspection, be put away without being duly closed. For
it behoves us to guard a book much more carefully than a boot.
But the race of scholars is commonly badly brought up and, unless they are
bridled in by the rules of their elders, they indulge in infinite puerilities. They
behave with petulance and are puffed up with presumption, judging of
everything as if they were certain though they are altogether inexperienced.
You may happen to see some headstrong youth lazily lounging over his
studies and, when the winter’s frost is sharp, his nose running from the
nipping cold drips down, nor does he think of wiping it with his pocket-
handkerchief until he has bedewed the book before him with the ugly
moisture. Would that he had before him no book but a cobbler’s apron!
His nails are stuffed with fetid filth as black as jet, with which he marks any
passage that pleases him. He distributes a multitude of straws, which he
inserts to stick out in different places so that the halm may remind him of
what his memory cannot retain. These straws, because the book has no
stomach to digest them and no one takes them out, first distend the book
from its wonted closing and, at length, being carelessly abandoned to
oblivion, go to decay. He does not fear to eat fruit or cheese over an open
book or carelessly to carry a cup to and from his mouth and, because he has
no wallet at hand, he drops into books the fragments that are left. Continu-
ally chattering, he is never weary of disputing with his companions and,
while he alleges a crowd of senseless arguments, he wets the book lying half
open on his lap with sputtering showers. Aye, and then hastily folding his

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arms, he leans on the book and, by a brief spell of study, invites a long nap;
and then, by way of mending the wrinkles, he folds back the margin of the
leaves to the no small injury of the book. Now the rain is over and gone,
and the flowers have appeared in our land. Then the scholar we are speaking
of, a neglecter rather than an inspector of books, will stuff his volume with
violets and primroses, with roses and quatrefoil. Then he will use his wet
and perspiring hands to turn over the volumes; then he will thump the
white vellum with gloves covered with all kinds of dust and, with his finger
clad in long-used leather, will hunt line by line through the page; then, at
the sting of the biting flea, the sacred book is flung aside and is hardly shut
for another month until it is so full of dust that has found its way within
that it resists the effort to close it.
But the handling of books is specially to be forbidden to those shameless
youths who, as soon as they have learned to form the shapes of letters,
straightway, if they have the opportunity, become unhappy commentators
and, wherever they find an extra margin about the text, furnish it with
monstrous alphabets, or if any other frivolity strikes their fancy, at once
their pen begins to write it. There the Latinist and sophister and every
unlearned writer tries the fitness of his pen, a practice that we have
frequently seen injuring the usefulness and value of the most beautiful
books.
Again, there is a class of thieves shamefully mutilating books, who cut
away the margins from the sides to use as materials for letters, leaving only
the text, or employ the leaves from the end, inserted for the protection of
the book, for various uses and abuses – a kind of sacrilege which should be
prohibited by the threat of anathema.
Again, it is part of the decency of scholars that whenever they return from
meals to their study, washing should invariably precede reading and that no
grease-stained finger should unfasten the clasps or turn the leaves of a book.
Nor let a crying child admire the pictures in the capital letters lest he soil
the parchment with wet fingers, for a child instantly touches whatever he
sees. Moreover, the laity, who look at a book turned upside down just as if
it were open in the right way, are utterly unworthy of any communion with
books. Let the clerk take care also that the smutty scullion reeking from his
stewpots does not touch the lily leaves of books, all unwashed, but he who
walketh without blemish shall minister to the precious volumes. And, again,
the cleanliness of decent hands would be of great benefit to books as well as
scholars if it were not that the itch and pimples are characteristic of the
clergy.
Books
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242
Textualities
Whenever defects are noticed in books, they should be promptly repaired,
since nothing spreads more quickly than a tear, and a rent which is neglected
at the time will have to be repaired afterwards with usury.