Late Medieval and Renaissance Libraries

As I scrolled through the various e-mails and blogs I subscribe to, I came across one for the Peterhouse Perne & Ward Library at Cambridge http://perneward.wordpress.com/ This blog has two posts of interest to our class. The first post describes Richard Crashaw, poet and patron of the library, the second post talks about a donation of books and the wonders that will be added to the collection.  Why include this blog in mine? and why now? The Peterhouse Perne & Ward was founded in 1286 and has a rich history. Check out their website to learn all about it.

A colleague pointed out Jenny Weston's wonderful blog posting entitled "The Last of the Great Chained Libraries" http://medievalfragments.wordpress.com/2013/05/10/the-last-of-the-great-chained-libraries/  . By the mid 1600s, most libraries have removed the chains from their collections. This is the last of the magnificent chained libraries. The photographs provide a glimpse of how difficult it must have been to read books that were attached to the wall, podium, or shelf.

If you want to read more about chained libraries, and their chains, check out John Willis Clark The Care of Books: An Essay on the Development of Libraries and their Fittings from the Earliest Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge at the University Press, 1901. (There's a digital copy on HathiTrust that's available through the KSU Libraries).

Here are some other books that shed light on the late Renaissance and Early Modern Period of Libraries. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (NY: WW Norton & Co, 2011) who writes about the discovery of Lucretius' De Rerum Natura and its effect on the thinkers of the Renaissance. One of the main characters is Poggio Bracciolini, a Renaissance book hunter, who traveled to monastery libraries seeking books in Latin and Greek. The books Poggio found were transcribed and printed in Italy for the growing class of literate merchants and tradesmen as well as the intelligentsia. An earlier chapter describes the library at Herculaneum which we covered last week.

The Name of the Rose (Everyman's Library Classics & Contemporary Classics) by Umberto Eco (NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980) describes the adventures of a monk (played by Sean Connery in the movie) as they investigate a murder in a monastery. There are detailed and vivid descriptions of the library in Day One after nones and Day Two after compline and at terce. I've included a movie clip of one of the library scenes in the syllabus.

The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte (NY: Harcourt, Inc, 1993) describes the hunt for the few extant copies of a Dumas manuscript. The book dealer / detective (played by Johnny Depp in The Ninth Gate) searches through private and academic libraries and book shops for these manuscripts. I've also included some movie clips of this book in the syllabus.

Aside from fiction about libraries, I thought  you might enjoy a humorous poem about librarians Das Narrenschiff, by Sebastian Brant, which he called The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde (first printed 1509). Here's a link to the lines of verse that describe the librarian.

If you want to read the text of the poems, there's a copy on Project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20179 . Look for "Here begynneth the foles and first inprofytable bokes."