The Battle of the Books

The Battle of the Books is the name of a short satire written by Jonathan Swift and published as part of the prolegomena to his A Tale of a Tub in 1705. Because of the satire, "The Battle of the Books" has become a term for the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns.

Ancients vs. Moderns

In France at the end of the seventeenth century, a minor furore arose over the question of whether contemporary learning had surpassed what was known by those in Classical Greece and Rome. The "moderns" (epitomized by Fontenelle) took the position that the modern age of science and reason was superior to the superstitious and limited world of Greece and Rome. In his opinion, modern man saw farther than the ancients ever could. The "ancients," for their part, argued that all that is necessary to be known was still to be found in Virgil, Cicero, Homer, and especially Aristotle.

This literary contest was re-enacted in miniature in England when Sir William Temple wrote an answer to Fontenelle entitled Of Ancient and Modern Learning in 1696. His essay proposed that modern man was just a dwarf standing upon the shoulders of giants, that modern man saw farther because he was standing on the learning of the ancients. He also saw modern man as a reflected light, while the ancients were sources of light: they possessed a clear view of nature, and modern man only reflected/refined their vision. Temple's essay was answered by Richard Bentley the classicist and William Wotton, the critic. Then Temple's friends/clients then attacked the "moderns" (and Wotton in particular). The debate in England lasted only for a few years.

The Satire

Jonathan Swift worked for William Temple during the time of the controversy, and Swift's A Tale of a Tub (1704) takes part in the debate. For the fifth edition of that work in 1705, Swift added a short satire entitled "The Battle of the Books." In this piece, there is an epic battle fought in a library when various books come alive and attempt to settle the arguments between moderns and ancients. In Swift's satire, the ancients sweep the field of the modern authors.

In one sense, the "Battle of the Books" illustrates one of the great themes that Swift would explore in A Tale of a Tub: the madness of pride involved in believing one's own age to be supreme. The other satire Swift affixed to the Tale, "The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit," illustrates the other theme: an inversion of the figurative and literal as a part of madness.