The Bodleian Library

The Bodleian Library in Oxford is actually not from the Middle Ages. It was founded in 1602 by Sir Thomas Bodley (1545 - 1613), an English diplomat and scholar. What he accomplished, however, was the salvation of what had existed in the Middle Ages.

The first library at Oxford was a collection of books left by Bishop Thomas Cobham of Worcester (died 1327). Those books were chained to tables for research, not for lending.

Between 1435 and 1437, the brother of King Henry V, Humphrey, 1st Duke of Gloucester, donated 281 manuscripts. The space where Cobham's books were stored was too small to accommodate the influx of material. A room above the Divinity School was built (finished in 1488) to store them all. That space is still known as Duke Humfrey's [sic] Library.

The Reformation (1550) saw the ruin of the library (not the building) in order to destroy any vestige of Roman Catholicism. Some books were removed by sympathetic people and hidden to keep them safe. The furniture was removed in 1556. Only three books from the original collection are there now. One was re-acquired only in the last few years.

Thomas Bodley began the restoring of Duke Humfrey's in 1598. Over the next decades, two wings were added, the east wing (Arts End) and west wing (Selden End), creating an "H" shape. It contains collections of art, maps, music, theology, and Western manuscripts.

Now there are five buildings that comprise the Bodleian, with off-site storage near Swindon. Its catalog includes over 13,000,000 items, the second largest collection in England after the British Library. It is one of a handful of "legal deposit" libraries (the British Library is another) to which a copy of all published works must be given.

Although he had access to wealth through his wife and father, Bodley recognized that donations would be needed to maintain the library, and he created the idea of a Benefactors' Book that would record every donation and be kept on display. In it we can see that Sir Walter Raleigh donated £50 in 1603, and Francis Bacon donated a copy of his book  The Advancement of Learning in 1605.

Tomorrow I'll tell you about some of the medieval works that exist inside the Bodleian.

Divine Right of Kings

The Protestant Reformation in the 1500s undermined the authority of and people's faith in the pope and the Catholic Church. This was a boon to temporal authorities, as people increasingly looked to kings for guidance. The king was considered to be answerable for his decisions and behavior to no one but God. (Eventually, of course, the lack of limits in a ruler came under question, since it removes any power from the people, and the revolutions of the late 1700s dealt with this.)

While it lasted, however, the notion of the divine right of kings was beneficial to the tiny percentage of the human population that could take advantage of it.

For Christians and Jews, a passage in Deuteronomy was crucial:

When you come to the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and you possess it and dwell in it and then say, 'I will set a king over me, like all the nations that are around me,' 15 you may indeed set a king over you whom the Lord your God will choose. One from among your brothers you shall set as king over you. You may not put a foreigner over you, who is not your brother." (Deuteronomy, 17:14-15)

Debates took place over whether this meant the people choose a king, or whether their choice is an example of God's will being made manifest. In fact, Jewish law requires a blessing upon seeing a monarch: "Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the universe, Who has given from His glory to flesh and blood." This suggests that the monarch has God's support.

Medieval Europe was willing to accept that God gave the ruler complete temporal authority, just as the Pope had complete spiritual authority. Richard I of England declared in 1193 "I am born in a rank which recognizes no superior but God, to whom alone I am responsible for my actions," and first used the phrase (still the motto of the monarch of the United Kingdom) Dieu et mon droit (French: "God and my right"). This is the origin of the pluralis majestatis, the "royal we" used by potentates, to indicate that they and God are speaking. Richard's Chancellor, William Longchamp, introduced the use of the plural into documents he produced during Richard's reign.

Henry VIII took this one step further (too far?) when he declared himself head of the Church in England. James VI /I of Scotland/England heavily promoted the divine right theory—although Scotland had always seen the king as simply "first among equals"—as did Louis XIV of France. James used a passage from Romans 13 about "God's ministers" to support his idea of divine right.

The earliest reference to divine rulership takes place long before James, or even Richard. Tomorrow we'll talk about Adomnán of Iona.

What About the Hospitallers?

 

Pope Clement V, who approved the order to arrest all the Templars, had earlier told them to merge with the Hospitallers, since it didn't seem necessary to him to have two groups who were performing the same function: guarding/assisting people traveling to the Holy Land. Who were the Hospitallers?

In 1023, a hospital was built in Jerusalem on the site of the Benedictine monastery of St. John the Baptist, to care for sick and injured pilgrims. When Jerusalem was taken over by the First Crusade, some Crusaders formed the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem—colloquially known as the Hospitallers—to support the hospital. A papal charter charged them with the care and defense of folk in the Holy Land. This evolved from caring for people to providing military escorts and then to fighting in wars for Christendom.

Once Jerusalem was retaken by Muslims, the Hospitallers made their home base in Rhodes. Even later they had to relocate to Malta. They spread far and wide, establishing a presence in England and Normandy by 1200. They spread to Ireland, to Hungary, to Russia, and of course around the Mediterranean. They even made a presence in North America: they briefly colonized four Caribbean Islands—including Saint Martin and Saint Barts—which they gave to France in the 1660s.

The Knights had a bad time during the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s when several large Northern European sections of the order broke from their Roman Catholic roots. The French Revolution abolished the Order in France along with abolishing feudalism and tithes.

The Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta, more commonly known now as the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, is considered the successor to the Hospitallers. The Order headquartered in Rome as of 1834; they performed extensive hospital work during the two World Wars. 

About that original hospital: it was excavated between 2000 and 2013, and was a replacement for an even earlier hospital. I'll talk about that next time.