Science in the Monastery: Texts, Manuscripts and Learning at Saint-Bertin, by Steven J. Livesey

Medieval monasteries were important sites of scientific study -until the centre of scholarly gravity moved in the twelfth century to the new universities, and monasteries began a gradual, inexorable decline.At least, that is the traditional story.Recent research has, however, done much to revise this narrative.Historians using a range of approaches -textual, codicological, prosopographical -have shown that the contemplation and investigation of nature remained an important part of monastic life right up to the end of the Middle Ages.They have revealed where and why monks attended universities, particularly from the fourteenth century, and how books moved freely between different scholarly sites.In this publication, by focusing on the scientific books of one important monastery, Steven Livesey has made a valuable contribution to our understanding of this developing field.The book is principally a catalogue of the scientific and philosophical manuscripts from the Abbey of Saint-Bertin that survive in the municipal libraries of Saint-Omer and Boulogne.Founded in the mid-seventh century in the far north of France, the abbey was strategically located between France, Flanders and England, and quickly became a cultural centre and site of intellectual transmission between those three regions.In eighty-eight pages of introduction to his catalogue, Livesey reveals the abbey's shifting scholarly significance from the inside outwards, through books ranging from theology to medicine, astronomy to metaphysics.Livesey's introduction begins by recounting the development of the Saint-Bertin abbey library: how books were produced as "high-status gifts" in the ninth century, supported a "distinguished school" in the twelfth, and were a resource for Erasmus and his circle in the early sixteenth (p.12).He examines the management of the library through the secundo folio references written on the flyleaves of one-third of the surviving manuscripts in order to streamline the annual audit.He looks in some detail at three celebrated early-medieval manuscripts: a copy of Lucretius' De rerum natura, an assemblage of Agrimensores texts, and the stunning decorated Aratea.Impressive as these books are, they are, Livesey points out, the "the only texts containing scientific material at the abbey prior to the millennium" (p.35).However, this was to change: gradually at first, as natural knowledge provided marginal support to a flourishing of humanistic study within the cloister; but with greater energy from the fourteenth century, as several monks went to study at the University of Paris, bringing their books and scholarly connections back to the cloister with them.Livesey dedicates a short section to the medical texts used for various purposes including the provision of expert evidence in legal cases, a longer section to a detailed examination of the scholarly activities of monks at the University of Louvain (founded in 1425), and a brief final section to two manuscripts of mathematics and optics.If the above summary seems a little disjointed, that is because the introduction is similarly unstructured.This is not really intended as criticism: the book is a catalogue first and foremost, and rather than accepting the constraints of a straightforward argument, Livesey follows where the medieval manuscripts lead.(For those seeking a clearer storyline, there are suggestions in his ample footnotes.)Whilst we do not get a neat narrative of the monastery's sciences here, we can enjoy several eye-opening vignettes.For example, Livesey provides a useful analysis of how the monk Pierre d'Allouagne drew on works by Aristotle and Averroes in notes for his lectures on the Sentences, and how Pierre's books show his connections to networks of book study and production in 1330s Paris.Most impressive is Livesey's study of the notes made by three monks in preparation for, and during, a set of lectures on Aristotle in the spring of 1482.It is thrilling to look over the shoulders of the three students in the Louvain classroom as each adds his own notes and diagrams to the expositiones he has copied in advance.As Livesey concludes, monks may not have been at the forefront of science in the later Middle Ages, but