The Lost Library of Jacques Philippe d’Orville (original) (raw)
2016
The paper exhibits the analysis of the private library of Federico Cesi (1585-1630), an important scientist in the XVIIth century, in particular involved in Botany, founder of the Accademia dei Lincei in 1603, to which also Galileo Galilei was enrolled in 1611. The library, containing about 3.000 items, which served also as library of the Accademia dei Lincei until 1630, has been dispersed. After Cesi's death, the library was sold to Cassiano Dal Pozzo almost completely, and his heirs in 1714 sold it to Pope Clemente XI Albani. Then, the collection was partly confiscated by French revolutionaries in 1798, and partly disappeared during the wreck of the ship which was conveying a large number of books, bought by the Imperial Library of Berlin, in the mid-nineteenth century. The bibliographic reconstruction of the library, containing works of Medicine, Alchemy, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, and Secreta, was based on the transcription of two manuscript inventories owned by the Accademia dei Lincei, containing rough descriptions of works and authors, and also using documents of Cesi Family's archive, kept in the Rome Archivio di Stato. The complete reconstruction in: Maria Teresa Biagetti. La biblioteca di Federico Cesi. Roma, Bulzoni Editore, 2008.
The Library of Gerard Nicholas Heerkens (1726–1801), Dutch physician, traveller, and Latin poet
Cromohs. Cyber Review of Modern Historiography, 2013
The very extensive library collection of Gerard Nicholas Heerkens (1726-1801), the cosmopolitan Dutch physician and Latin poet, 1 was sold at auction between 23 and 28 September and between 14 and 21 October 1805 at the University of Groningen. The auction was organized by the antiquarian and book dealer Jan Hendrik Bolt (active 1779-1845), 2 who prepared the catalogue. 3 If not the same person, Bolt was possibly a relative of a homonymous member of the radical De Jonge group (named after the proprietor of a cafe in Groningen, where a small group of republicans actively hostile towards King Willem II used to meet in the 1840s). The latter Bolt published the openly subversive and ultraradical democratic journal De Tolk der Vrijheid ('The Mouthpiece of Freedom'), run by the maverick republican Eillert Meeter (c.1818-62). The auction catalogue, published in Groningen in 1805, lists 4,964 titles (547 in folio; 1,061 in quarto; 2,827 in octavo; 529 in duodecimo). Each entry generally includes the author (only the initial of the first name is given), an abbreviated title, the place and year of the edition, the number of volumes (where appropriate), and an acronym that appears to relate to descriptive elements customarily used in Dutch for the format, state of preservation, and binding of works 4 , information clearly useful for fixing the starting price in the auction.
Revue bénédictine, 2023
AS ARCHIVIST AND CORRESPONDENT OF THE CABINET DES CHARTES Modern scholarship into the medieval past owes a great deal to the efforts of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century researchers. 1 Labouring in secular and especially ecclesiastical archives, they inventoried, transcribed, and subsequently also disseminated the contents of original documents, many of which were later confiscated, dispersed, or destroyed during the revolutionary period. Arguably the most ambitious of these efforts was coordinated by the Cabinet des Chartes, an office specially created for this purpose by the French government. Here, over the course of less than three decades (1762-90), the staff assembled an extraordinary collection of tens of thousands of copies of charters pertaining to the nation's medieval history. 2 Nearly two thousand volumes full of charter copies, letters, and working papers in the Collection Moreau of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris bear witness to the enormous scope of the project, the Cabinet's origins, and its internal organization. Furthermore, they also reveal the challenges faced by director Jacob-Nicolas Moreau (1717-1803) in realizing the analogue precursor of the modern full-text database that was the Dépôt des Chartes. 3 1. I wish to thank Melissa Provijn for her comments on the draft version of this paper. 2. D. Gembicki, 'Das Dépôt des chartes (1762-1790). Ein historisches Forschungszentrum', in K.
In Manuscript and Print: The Fifteenth-century Library of Scheyern Abbey
2014
This dissertation explores the library of Scheyern Abbey through religious, artistic, bibliographical, and historical paths in order to articulate more clearly the history of book production and library growth during the revolutionary "book age" of the fifteenth century. I have reassembled the now scattered fifteenth-century books from the monastery and examined the entire collection to show how one institution adapted to the increasing bibliographic requirements of the period, first through manuscript and then manuscript and This project entailed many quiet hours examining manuscripts and incunabula in rare book libraries in Europe and North America and far too many solitary hours staring at a computer screen, and yet there are a great many people to thank for their help, support, and encouragement during this process. If, in enumerating my gratitude, I have inadvertently overlooked anyone, my sincere apologies and heartfelt thanks nonetheless. First of all, I have to thank all of the librarians, curators, and archivists who allowed me access to their collections and answered my questions, whether in person or via email requests from overseas. Foremost among these is Bettina Wagner at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, whose generosity and hospitality have supported this project since its inception. Also at the BSB, I would like thank Brigitte Gullath, Head of the Manuscript and Rare Book Reading Room, who allowed me to see restricted materials and to produce binding rubbings. I must also thank Johannes Pommeranz and Antje Grebe (Nuremberg,