Princely Pieties: the 1598-1617 accessions of the Royal Library in Brussels (original) (raw)
Related papers
2013
The Habsburg Court of Brussels remains one of the few early modern princely courts that have never been thoroughly studied by historians. Yet it offers a unique case, particularly with regard to the first decades of the seventeenth century. Once home to the Dukes of Burgundy, the ancient palace on the Coudenberg hill in Brussels became the principal residence of the Habsburg governors in the Low Countries and, in the period 1598-1621, that of Archduke Albert and his wife, the Spanish Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia. Eager to reassert the dynasty's authority in these parts, the Archdukes ruled the Habsburg Netherlands as sovereign princes in their own right. Based on the author's prize-winning dissertation, this book vividly brings to life the splendor of their court and unravels the goals and ambitions of the men and women who lived and worked in the palace.
After the Fall of Antwerp in 1585, the book trade in the Southern Netherlands was in decline. Some printing houses managed to stay in business by specialising in Counter-Reformation publications. One of these was the Verdussen firm. This article shows how the publishing strategies of the Verdussens changed in the course of the seventeenth century by elaborating two case studies, one from the period 1629-30, and an other from the years 1649-50. These two examples provide an insight into the organisation, geographical scope and importance of the book trade in two different sets of socio-economic circumstances. It also shows the significance of Antwerp as a hub in the Catholic book trade and highlights the creative solutions publishers made use of in order to keep their heads above water.
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,
The Politics of Booklists: Library Catalogues and Self-Representation in the High Middle Ages
BMGN - The Low Countries History Review, 2024
High medieval booklists are routinely interpreted as administrative sources that existed to inventory book collections, somewhat similar to present-day library catalogues. Historians, however, have found them curiously unreliable and impractical. A case study of the Benedictine monastery of St. Laurent in Liège suggests a different approach to booklists. The thirteenth-century St. Laurent booklist was used, I argue in this article, to position the library as a centre of trinitarian expertise, fundamentally orthodox, and highly respectable. In order to do so, the booklist had to strategically neglect several books that might detract from the image of a perfect library. Booklists such as those from St. Laurent were, therefore, complex mixtures of the administrative with the political, and should be studied as such.
2022
In: Images of Royalty in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Tradition and Modernity in Italy, Portugal and Spain (Torino, Accademia University Press, 2022). Around 1830 Charles Albert of Savoy started the foundation of a new library, since the collections once belonging to the dukes of Savoy (the celebrated Grande Galleria of Charles Emmanuel I) had been given to the public, mainly the local University. The choices made by Charles Albert in starting new collections are the focus of the paper, along with an overall presentation of archival sources which inform on the subject. A comparison with the foundation of the Royal Library in the United Kingdom by George III along with collecting behaviour is also tackled in this paper.
Based on a combination of research methods and traditions, this three-part study presents a survey of the present state of knowledge about the production and ownership of deluxe manuscripts in the late-medieval Netherlands. Part One is based on the analysis of a corpus of about 3,700 extant illustrated manuscripts produced between 1400 and 1550 in the (northern and southern) Low Countries. The composition of this corpus made it possible to glean general information about many aspects of manuscripts production, such as chronological and geographical distribution, the various kinds of texts, dimensions, the languages used, and the relationship with the production of printed books. Substantial consideration is given to the methodological problem of the extent to which we can state that what we are discussing is also a faithful reflection of what was originally produced. The cautious conclusion is that surviving illustrated manuscripts might represent 20% of all those originally made. Compared to estimates for the survival of other objects this is an extremely high proportion. Part Two revolves around the leading owners of illustrated manuscripts in the Netherlands – the ducal family and the noble elite. The libraries of the Burgundian dukes and those of the foremost noble families are analysed by means of inventories and surviving manuscripts. In the wake of the great bibliophile duke Philip the Good we see the appearance among members of the noble elite born between 1420 and 1435 of a sort of fashion in book ownership. The many deluxe manuscripts they commissioned were typically ‘Burgundian’ in both outward aspect and content. In this respect they differ from the books owned by the lower court functionaries – the parvenus – who often sprang from burgher stock. We see how, by the building of a certain sort of library, a small elite demonstrated a group identity. This can be interpreted in the light of the ‘Burgundianizing’ of the Netherlands: under Philip the Good and Charles the Bold the noble elites of the various principalities were gradually transformed into a supra-regional group. Cultural expressions such as the acquisition of magnificent manuscripts played a role in this process. Part Three draw conclusions from the two former parts and enlarge the discussion. The (book owning) people as well as the manuscripts are part of society and both play their part in political, religious, social, economic and cultural life of the later medieval Low Countries. As an appendix to this book, a database containing information on some 3700 illustrated Netherlandish manuscripts (1400-1550) is published on the web: http://www.cn-telma.fr/luxury-bound/
Libraries From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance
Encyclopedia of Libraries, Librarianship, and Information Science
Since Antiquity, libraries have constituted a vital and organic part of the overall organization of an ecclesiastical or civic community. The accessibility and consultation of knowledge was at the forefront of early functioning societies. With the gradual dissolution of the Roman Empire, however, a substantial shift from pagan to Christian forms of socioeconomic as well as political circumstances occurred that prompted the establishment of collections of books which pertained to monastic communities. Until the recalibration of erudition through the first generation of scholars and erudite intellectuals, who sought a substantial reappropriation of Rome's antiquarian heritage in the later 14th century, these monastic libraries determined the pace of the progression of ecclesiastical as well as civic erudition. With the gradual formation of city-states and other forms of sovereign as well as self-governing communal governments, another paradigm in the evolution of libraries was introduced that would decisively delineate the features of the emerging 'Renaissance Library'. The following entry thus presents this development of libraries from the viewpoint of an entanglement between their institutional evolution and the respective actors engaged in the personnel of the administration and organization of book and manuscript collections from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
Book Trade Catalogues in Early Modern Europe, 2021
Scholars have long recognised that the study of early modern sales catalogues and private libraries requires more attention within Hebrew bibliography and Jewish book history.1 Despite some valuable case studies, a comprehensive historical overview and commonly accepted typologies are lacking. The source material is puzzling in its diversity and complexity, and there are many details that are unknown about historical bookselling and cataloguing practices. Because of these ambiguities it is essential to first address the question of how to define a Jewish book catalogue, and to gain an understanding of the catalogue genre itself, before being able to attempt a detailed study of the books listed in sales catalogues.2 Thus, the focus is particularly on the type and form of the catalogues, rather than their content. As a first step toward understanding what a Jewish library catalogue is, I provide here an overview of printed sales catalogues that belonged to Jewish owners, living in the Dutch Republic during the long eighteenth century. This 'long' century is defined as the period from circa 1665 to 1830, encompassing the years associated with the Enlightenment movement.3 First a typological reflection on the source material will be presented in this article. Then, I examine the catalogues of Jewish booksellers and printers, and discuss the often confusing practices in the book trade and printing business within the Jewish