The CERL Portal project:manuscripts and early printed material (original) (raw)

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