On the Loss of Early Liturgical Documents

Last year, I read a fascinating book called Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, by Dr Ada Palmer, who teaches history at the University of Chicago. I have subsequently recommended it to a number of friends, and all those who have read it have thanked me for the suggestion. Dr Palmer gives a unique take on the history of the Renaissance, and on the history of the idea of the Renaissance, that is, not just what it was, but what it meant, and does so with a truly engaging writing style. I knew I was going to enjoy the book when I laughed out loud at its opening sentence “The Renaissance was like the Wizard of Oz: great and terrible, and desperate for us not to look behind the curtain.” She also debunks many of the popular myths about the period, including some of the myths that were invented specifically to discredit the Church.

She recently gave a full-length interview to the podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, which is very much worth your time, but I wanted to share this clip from it in particular because it is something very pertinent to NLM’s subject matter. I am sure that many of our readers are familiar with the historical falsehood, popular with a certain kind of professional atheist, that the Christians deliberately burnt down the great library in Alexandria, and by doing so, destroyed an unfathomably large amount of literature and scientific knowledge. Here Dr Palmer explains that the real reason for the loss of so much of the classical world’s literary production is a much simpler and more practical one, namely, that it was written on papyrus. Once papyrus ceased to be easily available in the Western Europe (after about 600 AD), the region simply could not produce enough writing materials to save everything from the ancient world, as the papyri aged and began to fall apart. And of course, this also explains why we have such a dearth of liturgical texts from the early centuries of the Church. As I have noted various times before, the oldest surviving collection of liturgical material of the Roman Rite, the so-called Leonine Sacramentary, dates to roughly 550-75, and exists in exactly one very incomplete manuscript. Had it been lost, our next record of Roman liturgical texts would be from about a century later, the list of readings in the Wurzburg capitulary.