STEWART: I was drawn to the way the liturgy was celebrated. He grew up in Houston, studied at Harvard, and would have been a college professor, he tells me, if he’d not become fascinated by monasticism and captured in particular by the Benedictine ethos of Saint John’s.įR. And Columba Stewart has brought with him some centuries-old relics from the library’s archives, visibly marked by the passage of time. We’re surrounded by oversized pages from a lavishly illuminated handwritten Bible, a contemporary work in progress being overseen by the Queen of England’s calligrapher. And we sit down to speak in the gallery space of the library’s sleek austere structure. He wears the traditional black habit that is commonly worn among the monks of this community. TIPPETT: Father Columba Stewart is the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library’s current executive director. STEWART: It’s kind of thrilling in the adventure sense, but the real thrill is the poignancy of the moment of trust and the awe of being shown what these people hold most precious and what they really suffered to keep. And for the endangered communities around the globe who seek this place’s help, manuscripts are fragile links to a history they’ve kept alive in the face of civil wars, the appetites of commercial tourism, and even the appetites of rats and insects.įR.
Unlike printed books, manuscripts are one-of-a-kind relics. Today, the library’s work spans far-flung geographies, enjoining local partners from Ethiopia to Ukraine, from Lebanon to India. They created the manuscript library in the same period with an eye at that time to the Cold War threat to ancient European monastic repositories. It was designed by the Hungarian architect Marcel Breuer, commissioned by the monks of St. Turn off a nondescript Midwestern exit from the I-94 and it’s Bauhaus chapel appears on the horizon. Saint John’s Abbey and University, where the Hill Library is based, visually fuses a reverence for tradition and an embrace of modernity. Today, “Preserving Words and Worlds,” our 2009 exploration of the work of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library. In their lives, the relevance of handwritten manuscripts to the present and the cultural cargo of the past are revealed in a new light.įrom American Public Media, this is On Being, public radio’s conversation about religion, meaning, ethics, and ideas. We explore this with the monk who directs the library and an Ethiopian scholar who’s led some of its most intriguing work. There are worlds in this place on palm leaf and papyrus as in microfilm and pixels. And a thousand years later on a stretch of Minnesota prairie, Benedictine monks and photographers and scholars tend the world’s largest digital archives of medieval manuscripts and a vast repository of written living memory from endangered cultures around the world.
Across Europe’s Dark Ages, Benedictine monks hand-copied Latin and Greek texts from literature to mathematics, from philosophy to theology, literally helping to sustain Western civilization. I come with such great curiosity and anticipation. GETATCHEW HAILE: Well, every morning when I come to my office, I open a raffle ticket, you will say, when I open a manuscript. They’re very stable artifacts, and yet they are a great window to the past.
THERESA VANN: You know books are the highly portable artifacts. And in this work, the relevance of the past to the present is itself revealed in a new light.įATHER COLUMBA STEWART: The real thrill is the poignancy of the moment of trust and the awe of being shown what these people hold most precious and what they really suffered to keep. Today we travel to a monastic library that rescues writings from across the centuries and across the world. KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: I’m Krista Tippett.