The Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) (original) (raw)
The CERL Portal project:manuscripts and early printed material
2009
List of contributors Every book collector knows that books must be arranged in some kind of order to be useful. With a couple of hundred books, you may not need a very complicated system, and in the early Middle Ages, most cathedral and monastic libraries were rather small, even if we know of some libraries with holdings of several hundred books. But from the mid-twelfth century, with the rise of the universities, libraries start to grow, and reading habits start to change, too; instead of the slow and contemplative reading of one book at a time, practised in the monastic milieus of the Early and High Middle Ages, a new form of reading and a much more practical use of books emerged; the new generations of book users, the university people, used books to look up things, to compare texts, to prove or falsify theories. These users needed many books at a time, they wanted them quickly, and they wanted them to be there when they needed them. This type of book use was instrumental in creating the typical late-medieval and early-modern reference libraries furnished with long book desks, where books were chained, normally according to their subject matter. At the Sorbonne, for instance, they had such a reference library, called the magna libraria; this name, however, indicated that the room it was kept in was large (and probably that it contained the most important books), for, in 1338, it only contained some 330 volumes and the college actually owned a much more numerous book collection that was not chained and from which books could be borrowed by masters and students. If the older, small monastic libraries could manage well with rather primitive inventory lists, designed more to establish the ownership of books than for retrieval purposes, the new growing library collections called for better and more precise cataloguing and retrieval methods. Here, too, the Sorbonne showed the way. Their way of identifying single manuscripts by the incipit of the second folio spread widely and was used
Reconstructing book collections of medieval Elbląg
Fragmentology, 2021
Medieval manuscript collections in Teutonic Prussia have been particularly affected by numerous events in modern history, such as the Polish-Swedish wars and the turmoil after World War II. Still, the attempts to reconstruct the local collections may shed new light on the intellectual history of this historical region. To this date this kind of research was based mostly on surviving manuscripts with Prussian origin or provenance, that is, manuscripts produced or used in the territory of Prussia, supplemented by evidence on lost volumes derived from archival inventories. The article, taking as an example the history of collections of the city of Elbląg, discusses the potential of systematic studies of parchment waste used in bindings of manuscripts and printed books for reconstructing the intellectual landscape of the territory in question. It presents the range of provenance evidence that can link manuscript waste to the territory of Teutonic Prussia, including content, script, musical notation, binding and other material evidence.
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.
LIBER Quarterly, 2011
ProQuest's Early European Books (http://eeb.chadwyck.com) is an ambitious project which will build on the success of Early English Books Online (EEBO, http://eebo.chadwyck.com) by providing a single location from which scholars can study the collections of early printed sources held by libraries throughout Europe. EEBO is now established as the first port of call for any researcher studying early modern history or literature, but is of course limited to material printed in the British Isles, or printed elsewhere in the English language, from 1473 to around 1700. To some extent, scholarship and curricula have no doubt been skewed by the widespread availability of EEBO and the lack of equivalent comprehensive sources for printed works of other countries and languages. Early European Books will redress this balance by working with major libraries to digitise their collections of works in all other European languages and from any location in Europe, from the era of Gutenberg, Jenson and Aldus Manutius to the end of the seventeenth century. EEBO has been more than 70 years in the making, beginning with Eugene Power, founder of University Microfilms, filming rare books in the British Museum in the 1930s. This established the Early English Books microfilm series, which has had as its aim the capturing and cataloguing of all titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700). To date, more than 125,000 titles have been
Lost Books. Reconstructing the Print World of Pre-Industrial Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2016)
2016
Questions of survival and loss bedevil the study of early printed books. Many early publications are not particularly rare, but others have disappeared altogether. This is clear not only from the improbably large number of books that survive in only one copy, but from many references in contemporary documents to books that cannot now be located. In this volume leading specialists in the field explore different aspects of this poorly understood aspect of book history: classes of texts particularly impacted by poor rates of survival; lost books revealed in contemporary lists or inventories; the collections of now dispersed libraries; deliberate and accidental destruction. A final section describes modern efforts at salvage and restitution following the devastation of the twentieth century.
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,
Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes, 2016
This book is, in many ways, much more than the sum of its parts. It is divided into three sections tacking Packaging and Presentation, Consumers, Producers, Owners and Readers, and Writing Consumption. Some of the essays in the first section sometimes feel like rather a dry read when tackled alone but read as part of the volume they show how attention to aspects of book culture often overlooked, such as bindings, rulings, or text order, can add to our understanding of the way in which manuscripts not only functioned, but came to exist in particular formats. In fact, the idea of the book as 'material artefact', as the editors note (p. xiii), is at the heart of new research into the lives and afterlives of medieval and early modern books. Thus Anne Marie Lane's article 'How can we Recognise 'Contemporary' Bookbindings of the Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries?' takes as its starting point Mirjam Foot's observation that 'the history of bookbinding actually intersects with many different areas of study: religion, art, patronage, collecting, market forces, readership, book production and the booktrade' (p. 3). Using this framework she brings a curator's approach to the problems of analysing and identifying bookbindings. The article draws on a project at the Toppan Library at the University of Wyoming to identify original fifteenth-and sixteenthcentury bindings in pre-1550 books. Using these examples, the author tackles a series Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe 1350-1550: Packaging, Presentation an... Cahiers de recherches médiévales et humanistes , Recensions par année de publication
Charles William Dyson Perrins as a Collector of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts c. 1900-1920
Perspectives médiévales, 2020
is well-known in manuscript studies thanks to the collection he built in the early twentieth century, published in a large format catalogue in 1920. 1 If the name is known outside manuscript studies, it is probably in connection with the Lea and Perrins Worcestershire Sauce developed by his grandfather, which helped to make the family's fortune, or for his philanthropic generosity. Yet despite the familiarity of Perrins' name, the personality of the collector remains elusive, and descriptions of Perrins present him as a 'modest, shy, bookish man'. 2 Born on the 25 th of May 1864, Perrins inherited the family business on the death of his father in 1887. 3 However, he pursued a career in the army, serving with the Highland Light Infantry until 1892. In 1889 he married Catherine Gregory and they settled near Malvern, eventually moving into the Perrins family home, Davenham Bank. In 1898 they purchased Ardross Castle in Scotland, spending the summers there. Perrins' enthusiasm for manuscripts appears to have developed as an extension of an interest in rare books, presumably in the context of building libraries for his homes. He was purchasing early printed books from the dealer J. & J. Leighton before he began buying manuscripts from them in 1904. 4 In the 1920 catalogue, Perrins' first purchases of manuscripts are ascribed to 1902, and although the information provided in that catalogue is not always reliable, Perrins The research for this article has been undertaken as part of the CULTIVATE MSS project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 817988). I am grateful to the audience at the Medieval Academy of America meeting, 2019, for feedback on a version of this research, to the archivists at Bernard Quaritch Ltd. for access to their records, to the staff of the Bodleian Library and the British Library for help with their collections, and to Prof. Pedar Foss for information about Pliny manuscripts. Particular thanks are due to Katherine Sedovic and Elizabeth Morrison for checking manuscripts at the Getty Museum and Huntington Library, and to A. S. G. Edwards for additional information about the whereabouts of manuscripts and comments on this text in draft.
Some Notes on Research into the Provenance of Medieval Books
Quaerendo, 2011
Research into the provenance of medieval manuscripts and incunabula has generally focused on individual and institutional owners in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. Who were these books made for, and why? How were they used? What was the composition of the collections of which they were part? The traces of former owners in extant works are an important source of information on these matters. The histories of several incunabula from the collection of Museum Meermanno-Westreenianum in The Hague illustrate the importance of systematic research on the development of the collection of which they are part, and of using archival and printed sources (as well as other evidence) to reconstruct the eventful histories of individual works and the changes that were made to them over the years. Such research should also be conducted on past collections. Like genealogists, book historians should start from the present and progress backward in time.
Scholars' libraries in Hungary in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
2011
Hungarian historians started to publish archival sources regarding library history and the history of reading in r87ó in Magyar Könyszemle, one of Europe's oldest journals of book history. The published archival sources were in particular book lists included in probate inventories from different periods, inventories ofconfiscated books and other property, records of confiscations, and bills regarding book purchases. fn the period between the nro World Wars, Béla Iványi devoted most of his scholarly actiüry to these types of sources, and his collected papers were published in a separate volume.' Considering the fact that the historians of the Annales School started to publish similar sources on a regular basis at exactly the same time, and that it was in r94r that Lucien Febvre announced that he intended to analyse probate inventories as a particular type of source,t one can be proud of the achievements of the Hungarian historians. In the nineteen-fifties, Zsigmond Jakó emphasised the importance of a unified historical approach to material culture,3 that is, an examination of all objects listed as assets in probate inventories, and not separately the books, paintings, jewels, clothes, and other personal effects. In the same article, Jakó underscored the fact that an adequate picnrre of the book culture of a given period cannot be achieved by studying the archival sources alone, since owners'marks and handwritten annotations in extant books (such as ex-Iibris, sapralibros, shelf marks, other numbers, etc.) can reveal important information. In fact, such evidence can help us reconstruct book collections, estimate the number of lost books, and reveal reading habits as well as particular circumstances under which reading has taken place. In the nineteen-sixties' Jakó supervised provenance studies carried out by his students in Kolozsvár (today: Cluj-Napoca) and in other ancient Transylvanian collections. The evidence gathered through these Vimral visis to lost libroic: recomtruction of md accs to dispcrsed collcctim (uoro) ornr rrlsrs xr (rcrr) CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk
The Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL): A European Initiative
Elmar Mittler zum 65. Geburtstag
BACKGROUND The late 1980s was a time of major historical change in Europe as significant political events reshaped its boundaries once again. It was a time of optimism suffused with a desire for enlightened thinking and action in a European context. The genesis of the Consortium of European Research Libraries (CERL) arose from this time as European librarians and scholars began to consider the rich scope of historical printed collections across the whole of Europe, and to realize that technology now offered a powerful new tool to harness information about the contents of these collections, and make them more readily available to scholars and other users nationally and internationally. As Klaus-Dieter Lehmann (1966) has pointed out, 'Books have played a decisive role at major turning points in European history.' What had been until then a time-consuming and often laborious quest by ALEXANDRIA, 17(1),2005 Ann Matheson became Chairman of the Consortium of European Research Libraries in 2000. Educated at the Universities ofSt Andrews and Edinburgh, she worked until 2000 in the National Library ofScotland, Edinburgh. She has been involved with research library cooperation in Scotland through the Scottish Confederation of University and Research Libraries, and in the wider UK through programmes such as NEWSPLAN. She was General Secretary of the Ligue des Bibliotheques Europeennes de Recherche (UBER) from 1994 to 2000. Her research interests are in the eighteenth century, and she has contributed articles to a wide range ofscholarly andprofessional journals.