History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts, Robert Bartlett, Cambridge University Press, £20

What is a historian? What differentiates the true scholar of the past from the interested amateur? There is a vast range of possible answers (not all complimentary), but a useful rule of thumb is that a historian is someone who understands the evidence we do not have. That might sound strange, even paradoxical, but given time, interest, and knowledge of the relevant languages, anyone can wade through the sources for an historical period, person, or problem. It is something else to have worked out what has not survived or what was never recorded and to keep those slippery categories of material constantly in mind when trying to understand history.

The problem is particularly acute for the European Middle Ages, when enough has survived to give us an often very precise sense of how much more has not. You might imagine that the main culprits in this process of loss and destruction were censorious monks, piously destroying manuscripts whose contents they found scandalous. This is a startlingly inaccurate stereotype that has been remarkably hard to dislodge. In fact, the guilty party is really the modern nation-state, which combines a remarkable capacity for destruction with an instinct to gather medieval libraries and archives in central repositories, vulnerable to accident, artillery, and area bombing.

Robert Bartlett has produced, with History in Flames, an expert, stylish, and often grimly amusing guide to the hair-raising ways in which huge chunks of the medieval past have been lost. One of the most distinguished medievalists of his generation, Bartlett writes with the practised ease of someone who has spent a lot of time gently reminding students of things they probably ought to have already known. He has an eye for the telling anecdote and the memorable fact, as well as a dry wit that surfaces most often in parentheses. Readers will find a great deal to enlighten, entertain, and (perhaps) depress them in this concise and thoughtful book.

Bartlett starts with the way that medieval books and documents were created, kept, and transmitted. We get an expert and judiciously selected overview of the physical nature of medieval manuscripts, the lives and working habits of the scribes who copied them, and the libraries and archives in which they were stored. A very useful chapter surveys modern attempts to calculate how much was written in the Middle Ages and to work out how much has been lost. The various estimates – which cluster a little above 10 million manuscripts originally produced – suggest that, even on an optimistic view, something like 90 per cent of what was written has not survived.

Quantity is, of course, not everything and Bartlett offers a useful reminder that much of what we most value in medieval history and literature reached us only by the skin of its teeth. The poem Beowulf, so foundational for our understanding of the Anglo-Saxons and indeed of English literature, survived the Middle Ages in a single manuscript that narrowly escaped incineration in 1731.

The book’s main concern, however, is not the creation and transmission of medieval sources, but their loss. In the Middle Ages there were occasional acts of deliberate destruction. Popular unrest often saw legal or fiscal records destroyed: angry peasants burning the rolls that itemised their rents, or rioting town-folk scattering records of crimes or debts to the winds. These spasms of violence were usually localised and often selective. The destruction wrought by modernity was on a vastly grander scale.

Bartlett has selected five illustrative episodes, chosen to offer a broad sense of what was created in the Middle Ages and how it was lost. He starts with the libraries of Strasbourg, flattened by German artillery in the Franco-Prussian War. The Germans were trying to force the town to surrender through a large-scale bombardment targeted (or rather not targeted) at civilians, a rather novel technique in 1870. They ran out of shells and had to pursue a conventional siege anyway.

Next, we have the tragic destruction of the Dublin Public Record Office in 1922, in the course of the Irish Civil War. Anti-treaty forces were storing munitions in the Four Courts complex which housed the archives – shelling from National Army forces (with borrowed British artillery) seems to have caused a fire that eventually detonated these, with catastrophic results. The wanton German destruction of the State Archives of Naples in 1943 follows, all the crueller because Count Riccardo Filangieri – the head of the archives – had already taken the precaution of removing them from the city. The boxes of material were in a villa outside Naples when a squad of three German soldiers stacked them into a huge bonfire and set them alight. Rarely has so much history been destroyed by so few.

Filangieri had – sensibly enough – removed the archives from Naples to ensure they were not destroyed in Allied air raids. The British and American bombing campaigns in Western Europe lie behind the final two chapters of the book, on Hamburg and Chartres. The latter case is a particularly good illustration of the maddening sequence of coincidences that could lead to destruction. The French had removed the precious contents of Chartres’ libraries to a secure location, but the Germans had insisted the manuscripts be returned to the city as a way of normalising their occupation. The American bombers in May 1944 were trying to hit the airfield nearby and targeted the library only through accident or error. In this way perished a collection that was a priceless document of one of the great European centres of learning in the 12^th century.

Bartlett’s story is not, however, simply a grim sequence of destruction. He uses each of the five episodes as a perch from which to survey some aspect of medieval culture: the production of maps of the known world, for example, or the registers that documented the activities of the Angevin kings of southern Italy. He also devotes a good deal of attention to the heroic efforts to recover some of what has been lost. By piecing together singed fragments or hunting down the notes of an early-modern antiquary, we can sometimes get a sense of the contents of a lost manuscript or document. This is painstaking and unfashionable work, but Bartlett treats it with real sympathy and sensitivity. As he notes, most of the records of medieval Ireland were destroyed in a few explosive seconds – the work of reconstruction is now well into its second century.

There is only one subject, often mentioned in passing, that might have been brought closer to the centre of attention. The spectre of the French Revolution haunts History in Flames, for it really marked the opening of the modern era of destruction. The Revolution left in its wake a trail of burning archives and looted libraries. Piotr Dubrovsky – a Russian diplomat – exploited the chaos to acquire one of the finest collections of medieval manuscripts in the world, now mostly in St Petersburg, but a great deal seems to simply have been destroyed. Moreover, the Napoleonic state which emerged from the turmoil of revolution was the origin of that fatal modern pattern of centralised archives. Its mania for organisation was the reason so much had been gathered together in one vulnerable collection at Strasbourg, Naples, or Chartres. When historians try to reconstruct what we have lost from the Middle Ages, they are often grappling (consciously or not) with the legacy of 1789.