Animals in the Library
What animals would you expect to encounter in an historic library? For the latter stages of the Anthropocene, Eurasian cultures that have prized literacy have seen the amassing of books as one mark of the apogee of civilization, but we are not the only breathing beings to inhabit the spaces dedicated to bound volumes. Most obviously, in a world of manuscripts, book-chests and book-rooms were the resting place for the skins of cows, sheep and goats — the animals are dead but the parchment made from them holds a memory of their former lives, in its touch and its smell. I recall Anthony Grafton in one of his Lowe Lectures describing the sensation when, in the morning, the Vatican Library opens its manuscript vault: you are hit by a stench of beast.
The contents of libraries are built from the backs of animals, but they are also under attack from animals. In the 1881 classic jeu d’ésprit, The Enemies of Books, William Blades — a case of what is jocularly called nominalistic determinism, given that knives and razor-blades can be among the vicious enemies — devotes a chapter to the book-worm, though, as he notes, that animal cares only for paper and not for parchment.
Blades does not mention cats, but many who attempt to be both a biblio- and an ailurophile can find their twin loves in tension, with the cat not wanting their human’s attention to be distracted elsewhere. This is not merely a feature of modernity and of our own emerging post-modern age, as one page from a book in Magdalen College, Oxford suggests.
This is a fairly well-known image, thanks to social media, but the reason for this post is that I believe it deserves more explanation. First, we should consider where this cat might have marched across the page: was it in a scholar’s private study, or could it have been after the printing arrived at the safe haven of the College book-collection? The detail of the book is helpful here. It is an incunable, printed in Paris in 1475 of the Sophologium by Jacques Legrand (Jacobus Magni), who provided an anthology of wise words ranging across disciplines. The present binding is in a style seen on many Magdalen books, provided in a campaign of the second decade of the seventeenth century. It is not, however, the only book within this one binding: the volume is a Sammelband, in which the Sophologium is preceded by a copy of a local printing, the so-called Oxford Ales, a commentary on Aristotle from the press of Theoderic Rood in 1481. We have a record to demonstrate that Magdalen bought a set of copies of this work from Rood, who was their tenant (the relationship between College and printing is known but deeper than previously realised, as I explained in a conference paper in 2022 which I intend to publish). Both the printings show signs of both reading and other less intellectual engagement. The Sophologium has the cat paws; the Ales has doodles.
These seem to me to speak of someone of a young age, who has learnt some writing but would much prefer to draw — in short, a student, such as one might find in a college lecture room. My suspicion that the parts of the present volume were being used by undergraduates at Magdalen is strengthened by scribbles in the Sophologium. They are far few than in the Ales but one set is revealing.
As you can see, their author writes ‘John Stephyn ys wrytyng’. There was one John Stevyns in Oxford at the relevant time, a demy (undergraduate scholar) at Magdalen, admitted in 1507 and graduating BA in 1513.
It seems, then, highly likely to me that both incunables in their seventeenth-century binding arrived at Magdalen very early in their life and were used in teaching there. The implication is that the cat which walked across that page is a Magdalen cat. But why would a college have a cat within its grounds? Of course, we might imagine that John Stevyns was himself a devotee of felines but there is no guarantee that the two beings were in the college in the same years. Stevyns was a member of the community for at most six years, while there were longer-term reasons why a cat might have been useful. That returns us to the manuscripts in the library.
William Blades tells us that book-worms spurn parchment but that other vermin do not. He mentions mice and rats, giving an account of their activities from nineteenth-century Westminster Abbey. He could also have told the story of Sir Henry Cole’s rat, but he did not and neither will I, as the National Archives can do better than me. Instead, let me share with you another image, from Magdalen’s MS. lat. 115, an early fifteenth-century copy of commentaries on the Psalter.
If you look at the top and bottom left, you will see that the parchment has been nibbled, and the most likely culprit is a mouse. In another manuscript, a mid-fifteenth-century copy of Valerius Maximus, the rodent intervention is more alarming.
Is this a very voracious mouse, or a starving family of mice, or is it the activity of rats? It is said, that if you have rats, you will not have mice: are we then seeing eating habits from different eras? That is a question which could raise thoughts of animals’ preferences in texts to nibble but let us step back from that and concentrate on the main implication. These examples — and they are not alone in the collection — suggest that the library was, probably at more than one point, a home to uninvited rodents. How best to deal with that at time when the service of pest control professionals could not be called upon to assist? The obvious answer was to employ a cat as a ratter. It is my contention then that we should consider the possibility that the paws on the page in the Sophologium were made by the library cat, an animal present to protect the animal skins from other animals.
I want to end with an invitation: do you have evidence of mice or rats or cats or other animals engaging with manuscripts or early printed books? Then please do as I have done, upload and share them. Let us see how many furry figures we can discover in the deeps of our archives.
bonæ litteræ: occasional writing from David Rundle, Renaissance scholar 
Blades’s assertion that bookworms spurn parchment has been confirmed for me by manuscript conservators and the testimony of the books themselves: there are many books where one can see that a worm was happily munching through a beechwood binding, came to the first leaf of parchment, and then did an about face and went back into the wood.
Which is why the Old English Riddle 47 in the Exeter Book has always puzzled me, since the whole joke of the poem is that a worm eating a book ingested words but became none the wiser for it. Since an early medieval English writer would likely never have observed bookworms eating away the pages of a book, is this a sign that the riddle was based on or translated from an ancient source? Or is something else going on here?