A case of forced demarcation? The confessionalisation of Vienna and the project of the Imperial library (1575-1608) (original) (raw)
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Princely Pieties: the 1598-1617 accessions of the Royal Library in Brussels
Quaerendo, 2000
This article is concerned with one particular phase of the history of the ancient Royal Library in Brussels. It investigates how the Library developed during the first two decades of the reign of the Archduke Albert and the Infanta Isabella; an investigation permitted by the existence of an inventory compiled between 1614 and 1617. A substantial part of the article thus consists of an annotated transcript of the relevant parts of this inventory. On this basis, the article demonstrates that the accessions policy of the Royal Library in Brussels went through a significant transformation during the period in question: the Library changed from being a wide-ranging academic resource towards a more narrowly religious and recreational scope. However, as the article argues, this change was probably not caused by the Brussels Court of Albert and Isabella. Rather, it was due to the suppliers of the Library, the chief printing-houses and authors of the Southern Netherlands. Thus, whilst the 16...
The Baltic Battle of Books: Formation and Relocation of European Libraries in the Confessional Age (c.1500-c.1650) and Their Afterlife, ed. by Jonas Nordin, Gustavs Strenga, and Peter Sjökvist (Leiden: Brill, 2023)., 2023
This book is about the creation, relocation, and reconstruction of libraries between the late Middle Ages and the Age of Confessionalization, that is, the era of religious division and struggle in Northern Europe following the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the time, different creeds clashed with each other, but it was also a period in which the political and intellectual geography of Europe was redrawn. Centuries-old political, economic, and cultural networks fell apart and were replaced with new ones. Books and libraries were at the centre of these cultural, political, and religious transformations, frequently seized as war booties and appropriated by their new owners in distant locations.
The last quarter of 16 th century brought about a radical change in the religious climate across all of Europe. Confessionalisation started presenting inescapable challenges for humanists and heterodox thinkers. This new situation was complex in its breath and depth, and I will selectively illustrate this here by presenting a few typical cases, concentrating on the Habsburg monarchy and Silesia in particular. I begin by highlighting the change of climate with a brief sketch contrasting the irenism of the 1570s with the confessionalisation of the 1580s. My starting point is Vienna, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire under Emperor Maximilian II.
ERC-n° 771589: « Nicholas of Dinkelsbühl and the University of Vienna on the Eve of the Reformation
HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2019
on the Eve of the Reformation A few years ago, the members of a search committee-two Austrian Byzantinists from the University of Vienna, a French medievalist, and an American-were sitting in a Syrian restaurant in Cyprus, discussing the Crusades in Modern Greek, when the conversation shifted to how certain professors in some Greek universities had been accustomed to sitting and reading their own textbooks aloud to their classes, year after year after year. One of the Austrians turned to the American and said (we translate): "Ever hear of Thomas Ebendorfer? He was a big guy in the Faculty of Theology at Vienna, several times the rector, in the first half of the fifteenth century. All he did in his lectures was read his own commentaries on Scripture over and over again every year!" From a modern standpoint, the early University of Vienna has been taking a beating recently. The latest research, including our own, has shown that, in the fifteenth century, instruction at Vienna seems to have consisted of the repeated reading of a standard text of recent composition or compilation, often with very little variation. 1 Knowing the basics of Viennese doctrine throughout the period often simply requires knowing this standard text, be it in ethics, logic, or biblical studies. This was the case with systematic theology as well, and the American in the conversation noted above was quite familiar with Thomas Ebendorfer's lack of originality. Yet this modern perspective does not approximate the late-medieval view of the new university, or of the practice of recycling old material. In 1391, Jean Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, traditionally considered the queen of universities, wrote a brief question entitled Pro unione Ecclesiae wherein he showed himself to be quite secure in the continuing prominence and even dominance of the University of Paris within the European intellectual landscape. For this reason, he remarked that it was in his university that one might find the "most famous doctors": "In no other college are there doctors as famous as those who are in the University of Paris, especially in theology." 2 Gerson was doubtless unaware that to the east of France, at that exact moment in 1391, Henry of Langenstein (ca. 1325-1397), a famous German theologian educated at Paris, was expressing the opposite opinion when he asked the following rhetorical question in a letter addressed to Duke Ruprecht of Bavaria: "Why is it that the universities of France are breaking up, that the sun of wisdom is eclipsed there? Learning
Print Culture at the Crossroards. The Book and Central Europe, edited by Elizabeth Dilleburg, Howard Louthan and Drew B. Thomas, Brill Publishing, 2021, 2021
Post-Tridentine Liturgical books, such as Breviaries and Missals, have until now been scarcely considered in Book history, although they may provide a wide range of insights, crossing cultural, political, religious and confessional history. Moreover, scrutinizing liturgical calendars and Propers of Saints makes possible to reassess such seemingly independent topics as the question of coexistence of norms and competences in celebrating feasts, the one of local identities interacting with the new frame of the Roman Breviary (since 1568) and Roman Missal (since 1570), and even the changes in vernacular literary culture of the Counter-Reformation. All those aspects and processes deserve better understanding in Central Europe. In Historiography, Central European bishops are commonly supposed to have soon accepted the new Roman liturgical order, though the point is by no means so simple. Furthermore, liturgical reorganization, breviaries and hagiographical books had many features in common, as already brilliantly demonstrated, for instance, by Simon Ditchfield for Italian Piacenza. On one side, ancient and recent Breviary lessons often appear as a matrix for vernacular hagiography and catholic devotional books in Czech, Hungarian, German or Polish during the Counter-Reformation era. On the other side, the new Officia propria sanctorum patronorum of the Kingdoms of Bohemia and Hungary mixed Latin old and new texts, but were always presented as the true expression of timeless local historical and sacral tradition, in a time of re-conversion to Catholicism and complete disruption of religious habits. Though these books should have been approved by the Roman Congregation of Rites, some of them introduced “old-new” feasts and saints -especially in Bohemia. We shall try to reconstruct the local reasons of such liturgical innovations and to highlight their links to latin and vernacular literary culture, as well as to the reshaping of local identities.