The Chimes

On New Year’s Eve 2022, Abbot John was up in the monastery library, showing the grand room to a couple who were spending a few days in the monastery guesthouse. Being Benedictine Oblates, they had a ‘family’ interest in seeing the library. As it was a Saturday, the Abbot was slightly less involved in the administrative aspect of his role and took the opportunity to show the visitors the part of the library that is housed in its original location on the first floor of the south wing.

There is one large room – the main library – entered via the adjoining smaller room on its east side. This latter room opens from the veranda. It contains the Migne collection of the Patrologia Graeca (Greek Patrology) and the Patrologia Latina (Latin Patrology) in the open shelves of the east wall. The open shelves on the other walls have miscellaneous books on monasteries, historical, biographical and hagiographical works, dictionaries and encyclopaedias. Below the open shelves all around there are enclosed shelves in locked cabinets.

The other smaller room, to the east of the first, houses the no-longer-used library card catalogue. Our librarian began the digital catalogue in the early 1990s. The card system stopped being kept up to date once the digital catalogue contained all the library’s holdings. It is now a fairly impressive museum piece, but better displayed in the place where it was used.

For a number of years, a particular item in the library holdings, too large and bulky to be placed upright on a shelf, and not something in regular use, had not been sighted. Published in 1982 and purchased in 1983, it is an elaborate facsimile of a mediaeval lectionary from the Abbey of Montecassino now located in the Vatican Library. The writer remembers having last seen it when it was housed in a cabinet in the main room under the section with books on monasticism and the Benedictine Order.

With changes in the monastic community and in librarians, we lost track of one of the keys to the locked cabinets in the Patrology room. While showing the visitors the card catalogue as mentioned earlier, Abbot John opened one of the drawers marked NO, i.e., with cards beginning with the letter ‘N’ followed by those with ‘O’, and was surprised to find two keys with tags marked ‘Glass Case 1’ and ‘Glass Case 2’ for opening the two large book cases with glass doors in the top half in the same room. There was a third key, a flat Lockwood, with nothing on its tag. He emailed the news to the members of the library committee.

After Mass the next day (the civil New Year’s Day, liturgically the Solemnity of Mary, the Holy Mother of God) the writer went to investigate. Beginning at the locked cabinet at the north-east corner, he opened the doors in succession, finding some shelves full of books, some with empty boxes or a few books, others empty. When he reached the cabinets under the dictionaries and opened the second one, to his relief he immediately recognised the large wooden case containing the ‘long-lost’ large and richly-bound Codex Benedictus with its simple companion volume containing a history of the Codex and details of its contents and the illuminated capital letters that enhance elaborate liturgical manuscripts from the Middle Ages prepared for use on major feast days – in this case, those of St Benedict, St Maur and St Scholastica.

Fr David OSB