BOOK OF THE DAY: SÍOBHÁN FITZPATRICKreviews Marsh's Library: A Mirror on the World: Law, Learning and Libraries, 1650-1750, Eds Muriel McCarthy and Ann Simmons Four Courts Press, 311pp, €55
THE TITLE of this volume, which contains the papers presented at a conference held in 2007 to commemorate the tercentenary of the act of parliament which established Marsh’s Library as a “publick library for ever”, perfectly encompasses the range of contents held therein.
Including 13 essays and an introduction, this book focuses not on Marsh’s Library per se – the library has been comprehensively analysed and described in two earlier works: Muriel McCarthy’s All Graduates and Gentlemen: Marsh’s Library (Four Courts Press, 2003; original ed. 1980) and The Making of Marsh’s Library: Learning, Politics and Religion in Ireland, 1650-1750 (Dublin, 2004), co-edited with Ann Simmons. Instead, it positions the library in the Ireland of its time.
Working from the general to the specific, we are first presented with Jack P Grene’s exploration of British imperial expansion in the Americas and elsewhere during the 17th and 18th centuries and in a fascinating essay, which elucidates the different administrative approaches applied for the governance of the disparate regions on which the naissant empire’s sun shone, Grene posits Ireland very much as a “subordinate associate” of Britain, rather than a colony.
The political, religious and social worlds in Ireland during the 17th and 18th centuries are then described and discussed in some detail. DW Hayton, in a paper on the bishops as legislators, elaborates the role of the Church of Ireland bishops in both initiating and enabling legislation by virtue of their position in the House of Lords.
However, he shows that there was more manoeuvring and promulgation of Bills than actual results: between 1692 and 1713 only seven of the Bills initiated by the bishops received royal assent.
The paper provides an insight on the leading characters, their political associations, personal allegiances and grievances, and strongly features the person of William King, archbishop of Dublin, who was both controlling and opinionated. However, it was King’s predecessor, Narcissus Marsh, by then archbishop of Armagh, who moved the “Act for settling and preserving a publick library for ever”, enshrined, after long and tortuous negotiations, not least among the lord bishops, as 6 Anne, Chap 19, 1707. The protracted lead-in to the Act is detailed in a contribution by legal historian W Neil Osborough.
Marsh’s magnanimous gift of a public library for which he paid himself and to which he willed the income from a holding in Co Meath is to his lasting credit.
Marsh’s perspicacity extended to recruiting the services of Dr Elie Bouhéreau, a Huguenot refugee from La Rochelle, which led to the latter’s donation of his library, smuggled out of France under the guise of a sale to a contemporary in England, to Marsh’s. Bouhéreau’s library, here analysed in great detail by Benedict and Léchot, added more than 2,000 titles to Marsh’s own.
The volume includes more for the bibliophile than can be discussed here. Suffice to draw attention to the papers on the writing of history in 17th-century Ireland (Elizabethanne Boran on Dudley Loftus’s annals); Ruth Whelan discusses a popular 19th-century English novel, based on the true story of a Huguenot galley slave, Louis de Marolles, which enables a discussion of the writing of French Protestant history and the transposition of texts to other cultures for political-religious purposes.
Raymond Gillespie discusses manuscript (in Irish and English) collectors; the late Arch Elias, a Swift conundrum; Marie-Louise Legg, the library catalogue of 1743; Toby Barnard, Bishop Stearne’s book collection, now at Marsh’s.
These papers reveal much about the owners of the books and their responses to them.
Michael Brown positions learning in mid-18th-century Ireland in an essay which reflects on the changing view of public and private spaces in that century and the role of coffee houses, theatres, bookshops and taverns in redefining those spaces.
Many of the essays cross reference, thereby adding to the value of the overall experience of reading this book which is aimed at a scholarly audience but should appeal to those interested in history, in 17th- and 18th-century Dublin, and in bibliography.
Siobhán Fitzpatrick is librarian to the Royal Irish Academy. She recently co-edited, with Dr Bernadette Cunningham, Treasures of the Royal Irish Academy Library