Libraries

LIBRARIES

LIBRARIES. The period 1450–1789 witnessed an unprecedented expansion in the publication, circulation, and readership of books. Such dramatic changes in patterns of literacy and book use are amply reflected in the history of libraries in the period.

MEDIEVAL INHERITANCE

By the late thirteenth century the scriptoria and companion book collections of the early medieval period had been eclipsed in importance by the rise of college libraries, particularly in Paris and Oxford. The most famous of these was the Sorbonne library in Paris, founded in 1287. Its 1290 catalogue lists over 1,000 manuscripts, and the library would expand to more than 2,500 volumes by the end of the fifteenth century. Equally important were the libraries of the studia (study houses) of the monastic orders. Over time, a body of regulations governing college and conventual libraries evolved. Many of these libraries employed sophisticated cataloguing and classification systems. While there was no single model of classification, most conformed to a recognizably Scholastic pattern, descending from theology, through philosophy and the other two university faculties of law and medicine, to logic, rhetoric, and grammar, with appropriate subdivisions where warranted by the quantity of books.

The expansion of private libraries in the late medieval period was closely related to the institutional libraries of the university colleges and study houses. Members of the three professions—churchmen, lawyers, and physicians—responded to changing patterns of literacy and professionalization that demanded increased textual expertise with ever-expanding collections of professional textual materials.

RENAISSANCE AND REFORMATION

This milieu fostered the bibliophilia of the first major humanist book collector, Francesco Petrarch (1304–1374). Petrarch's library was not only large for the age (some two hundred volumes), but unusual in that it contained not the canonical texts and core manuals of the professions, but the works of classical authors and the church fathers. In early-fourteenth-century Florence, Coluccio Salutati (1331–1406) and Niccolò de'Niccoli (c. 1346–1437), key figures of Florentine humanism, built up collections of around eight hundred volumes. Niccoli was one of the first systematic collectors of older manuscripts, which he knew to be more accurate than later copies. Both before and after the fall of Constantinople, Greek émigrés such as Manuel Chrysoloras (c. 1353–1415) in Florence introduced many important Greek texts previously unknown to Western libraries. The library of Cardinal Bessarion (1403–1472) was the most important such collection for the transmission of Greek texts to the West. Bessarion's library contained over 1,000 volumes and was bequeathed to the Venetian republic after his death. From Venice, they were copied and recopied to furnish Western libraries with Greek manuscript texts. Important institutional Renaissance libraries were established in Florence, with the 1444 San Marco library, and in Rome, with the Vatican library first of Nicholas V (c. 1450) and, subsequently and more permanently, Sixtus IV (1471–1484).

The religious conflicts of the sixteenth century had a major impact upon libraries, both positive and negative, in Protestant and Catholic Europe. Most dramatic was the dissolution of the monasteries in England in the 1540s and the dispersal and loss of thousands of medieval manuscripts. The college libraries of Oxford and Cambridge suffered similar, if less systematic, loss. In Germany the holdings of many monastic libraries were absorbed by existing town and court libraries. In the last half of the century the French Wars of Religion resulted in the destruction of many important ecclesiastical libraries. It is no coincidence that this period witnessed the first postmedieval renaissance of systematic bibliography, with the efforts of Conrad Gessner (Bibliotheca Universalis, 1545) in the Swiss confederation, John Bale (Illustrium Maioris Britanniæ Scriptorum, 1548) in England, and Flacius Illyricus (Catalogus Testium Veritatis Basle, 1556) in Germany.

The upheaval of the first half of the sixteenth century was countered by a considerable consolidation of library collections in the second half. This period witnessed the consolidation and foundation of important collections across Catholic Europe: the Escorial in Spain (1575), the Imperial Library in Vienna (reorganized in 1576), the new Vatican library of Sixtus V (1589), the Hofbibliothek in Munich (1558), and the Ambrosiana in Milan (1609). This chain of Catholic libraries presented a wall of orthodoxy across Europe, a self-conscious effort at intellectual containment of Protestant gains. In Protestant Europe a number of important collections emerged: the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel (1572) and the Bodleian Library at Oxford (1602) were the most important. These libraries marked a watershed in establishing permanent institutional locations for the medieval manuscript heritage and in amassing unprecedented quantities of printed books. The Ambrosiana, for example, amassed a collection of some 15,000 manuscripts and 30,000 printed books in the decades after its foundation. By 1666, the ducal library at Wolfenbüttel held over 55,000 printed books. Most had established, if highly restricted, hours of opening. Access was equally restricted to members of established circles of scholars. Private collections also grew in size, frequently providing the nucleus of both local and far-flung networks of learning. Such was the case with the libraries of Claude Dupuy (1545–1594) in Paris and Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601) in Padua. Pinelli, whose library and collections housed the young Galileo while he was composing his Padua lectures, could boast of over 6,000 printed books and 700 manuscripts, making it one of the largest private libraries of the period.

SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

This period saw continued consolidation and expansion of major collections and witnessed a growth in the political importance of libraries. Quasi-public libraries such as those of the de Thou family in Paris or Sir Robert Cotton (1571–1631) in London constituted loci of parliamentary intellectual activity and housed documents of great legal and historical importance. Their libraries were mirrored in the collections of legal and political élites across Europe. Conversely, Cardinal Mazarin's (1602–1661) formidable library in Paris (1643) became a powerful emblem of ministerial and royal authority: it was dispersed—forbidden to be sold intact to a single buyer—during the Fronde of 1651. The reorganization of the French Royal Library (1661) under Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–1683) transformed that library into a formidable political symbol of the French monarchy and, through Colbert's patronage, into a unique locus of learning in Europe.

As a result of the new cultural importance of libraries in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and in response to the growing pressures of the print revolution, a recognizable discipline of library organization and classification developed. Gabriel Naudé (1600–1653) in his 1627 Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (Advice for establishing a library) sought to establish universal principles for library organization and cataloguing sensitive to both the enormous growth of print and the intellectual needs of members of the republic of letters. The real home of library science during the Enlightenment would be Germany, where the subject of library organization was taught in the universities and where both professorial and university libraries were organized on a loose arrangement much indebted to both Naudé and Francis Bacon (1561–1626). This development reached its culmination in 1734, with the library at the University of Göttingen, the first modern university "research" library.

The major development of the eighteenth century was the expansion of vernacular book collections. These libraries favored romances and novels in addition to the traditional vernacular genres of religion and history. The new genres provided the backbone of the lending libraries and popular reading rooms, important new features on the European library scene in the eighteenth century. More books were increasingly available to more people, and levels of personal ownership of books increased across the social spectrum. Many of the older institutional libraries rushed to embrace the new ideal of the public library (though many had long functioned as quasi-public institutions): for example, the French Royal Library in 1720 and the Imperial Library in Vienna in 1726 both opened their doors as public libraries. In 1753, Britain finally had an institution to match its continental rivals with the establishment of the British Library. But it was the nationalization of the French Royal Library at the Revolution and its confiscation of former monastic holdings that would set the standard for the large national continental libraries of the nineteenth century.

See also Dissemination of Knowledge ; Education ; Humanists and Humanism ; Literacy and Reading ; Printing and Publishing ; Universities .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Fehrenbach, R. J., and E. S. Leedham-Green, eds. Private Libraries in Renaissance England: A Collection and Catalogue of Tudor and Early Stuart Book-lists. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. 5 vols. Binghamton, N.Y., 1992–1998.

Grendler, Marcella. "A Greek Collection in Padua: The Library of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601)." Renaissance Quarterly 33 (1980): 386–416.

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Hobson, Anthony. Great Libraries. London, 1970. A magnificently illustrated survey, with bibliography, of major Renaissance collections.

Nelles, Paul. "The Library as an Instrument of Discovery: Gabriel Naudé and the Uses of History." In History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. D. R. Kelley, pp. 41–57. Rochester, N.Y., 1997.

Nolhac, Pierre de. La bibliothèque de Fulvio Orsini. Paris, 1887. Reprint Geneva, 1976.

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Serrai, Alfredo. Storia della bibliografia. 11 vols. Rome, 1988–2001.

Sherman, William H. John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. Amherst, Mass., 1995.

Stam, David H., ed. International Dictionary of Library Histories. 2 vols. Chicago, 2001.

Ullman, Berthold L., and Philip A. Stadter. The Public Library of Renaissance Florence: Niccolò Niccoli, Cosimo de' Medici and the Library of San Marco. Padua, 1972.

Vernet, André, ed. Histoire des bibliothèques françaises. 4 vols. Paris, 1988–1992.

Paul Nelles