Summary: We travel to a monastic library that rescues manuscripts from across the centuries and across the world. And there are worlds in this place on palm leaf and papyrus, in microfilm and pixels -- stories of ordinary life as well as the rise and fall of civilizations. We explore this with Fr. Columba Stewart, a Benedictine monk and its executive director, and Getachew Haile, an Ethiopian scholar who has led some of its most intriguing work. In their lives as in this work, the relevance of ancient manuscripts to people of the present, and the cultural cargo of the past itself, are revealed in a new light.
