‘A Bunch of Books. Book Collections in the Medieval Low Countries’, with Renée Gabriël, Queeste. Journal of Medieval Literature in the Low Countries 20 (2013), 63-68. (original) (raw)
Related papers
2010
Institute of Information Studies, Tallinn University, 25 Narva Road, 10120 Tallinn, Estonia E-mail: tiiu.reimo@tlu.ee The article treats library catalogues and book lists recorded in probate inventories as sources for studying book ownership and reading history in Estonia. Based on research literature, editions of source materials and practical experience in library work, the information about books in catalogues and probate inventories of the 17th and 18th centuries is analysed and the aspects that must be considered while interpreting the information are demonstrated. The author’s point is that data retrieved from archive records and printed sources must be carefully studied and complemented, when possible, with information from surviving books in order to get as authentic picture of intellectual communication in the past centuries as possible.
Modern Philology, 2012
This superb account of the invention of the library in England leads the reader on a journey from the late Middle Ages to the seventeenth century, not only describing early libraries and their makers in exquisite detail but also convincingly demonstrating Jennifer Summit's claim that early modern literary history cannot be written without understanding the ''phenomenon of the library'' (Foucault's phrase) that shaped and formed it (37). 1 Summit's range and depth of reference are both intently focused and impressively capacious throughout as she explores the library as a place, an idea, and a set of methods. She brilliantly narrates the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance by describing the fate of books as they were first cataloged in the fifteenth century, displaced and sometimes destroyed or disarticulated as the monasteries were taken over during the Reformation, and finally reassembled into the libraries of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Summit has an equal facility with medieval and early modern texts, making her uniquely capable of rethinking the import of the Reformation, mapping out its origins, and considering its effects. This book is a groundbreaking volume that will have enormous significance for literary scholars, historians of the book, bibliographical scholars, and many others; Summit's revisions of received wisdom about books and libraries pre-and post-Reformation are compelling, forceful, and undeniably convincing. The book is divided into five chapters, each of which discusses specific libraries and librarians as part of a narrative of what might be called ''knowl-For permission to reuse, please contact journalpermissions@press.uchicago.edu.
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.
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.
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
Monastic Libraries in East Central and Estern Europe between the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment, 2020
The paper offers an analytical comparison between the book collections of Franciscan friars in the city of Padua, Northern Italy, during the fifteenth century. In order to do so, the study offers, first, a swift survey of the medieval book collections of Dominicans and Austin friars, and then it considers with further detail on the one hand, the library of the Friars of the Community, or Conventuals, and on the other, the book collection of the Friars of the Observance, or Observants. The exceptional circumstances of preservation of their book collections allows one to compare their libraries in terms of their respective tradition, dimension, and composition of the collection. The study explores their similarities and pays particular attention to their differences. As a result, it will offer an insight into how specific typologies of books were related to each collection, how the strategies of circulation of volumes guaranteed their availability, how the original cluster of the libraries reflect the nature of friars as readers and writers, and into how their apparently contradictory nature reveals late-medieval conceptions of librarianship that had significant and lasting impact in written culture. A section of the contribution is offered.
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.