In 48BC, when Julius Caesar inadvertently burned down the great Library of Alexandria, the flames took with them an irreplaceable store of knowledge about the ancient world. We will never know just what it is we will never know. Since our understanding of the past is almost exclusively reliant on paper, says the historian Robert Bartlett, it is a wonder so much has survived. In this book he examines instances when irreplaceable tranches of medieval documents were destroyed by human agency, the irony being that gathering them in one place, in libraries and archives, made them less safe rather than more so.
In a series of case studies he highlights just a few of the losses. When Strasbourg was pulverised in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War, among the manuscripts destroyed was The Garden of Delights, a 12th-century illustrated encyclopedia; when the Public Record Office in Dublin was burned in 1922, so was the archive that chronicled centuries of the history of colonial Ireland; when the state archive in Naples was fired by German troops in 1943, great swathes of detail about Norman Sicily were lost. As Bartlett heart-wringingly shows, history has too often proved to be as fragile as the paper it was recorded on.
By Michael Prodger
Cambridge University Press, 220pp, £20
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