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Libraries & Culture 36.2 (2001) 379-380



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Book Review

Leuven in Books, Books in Leuven:
The Oldest University of the Low Countries and Its Library


Leuven in Books, Books in Leuven: The Oldest University of the Low Countries and Its Library. Edited by Christian Coppens. Louvain, Belgium: Louvain University Press, 1999. 324 pp. 1700 BEF (42.14 EURO). ISBN 90-6186-951-X.

Leuven in Books, Books in Leuven is a catalog published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title held between March and May 1999 at the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and organized by the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. It is a handsome, 8 1/4 x 11 3/4 inch soft-cover catalog printed on permanent paper that retraces the turbulent history of one of the world's foremost academic libraries. It includes numerous black-and-white illustrations of objects in the exhibit.

The history of this tradition-rich Flemish university and its library starts in the fifteenth century. The authors--who are all librarians at Leuven--provide the historic and cultural context of the foundation of the university in 1425 and of the library in 1636. Of a total of ten chapters, the first five retrace the history of the library through the Humanistic period, the Renaissance, the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the Belgian Revolution.

The emphasis is on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during which Leuven established itself as one of the intellectual centers of Europe and attracted Europe's most brilliant minds: Erasmus (1466?-1536), Juan Luis Vives (1492/93-1540), Thomas More (1478-1535), and Gerardus Mercator (1512-94) studied and published in Leuven, as did Justus Lipsius (1547-1614), who was most closely associated with the university. The strength of the catalog is its focus on this rich history through detailed descriptions of the artifacts and manuscripts on display and by situating the historic events and scholastic achievements within their European context. [End Page 379]

The catalog proceeds with the description of the first of three fundamental events that shaped the library in the twentieth century: the destruction of the library by the German army in 1914. The library was rebuilt mainly by American philanthropists and German reparations, and the account of its reconstruction includes a description of the new collection and the emblematic architecture of the building. In 1940 the library was destroyed a second time by the Germans and, again, rebuilt through donations from the American Book Center, further German reparations, and the acquisition of several important private collections. The latter are described in detail in the catalog, as most artifacts and manuscripts on display were acquired at that time. In 1968 the university, which had previously offered courses in both French and Dutch, was split into two independent, monolingual institutions. As a consequence, the holdings of the library were arbitrarily divided between the Dutch Catholic University Leuven and the new, French-speaking university of Louvain-la-Neuve. Among the post-1968 acquisitions, two particular collections stand out: the theological library and the Husserl archives. Both are unique and of international importance, and they are described in detail. Today, the collection of the Leuven university libraries has reached about four million volumes.

Formally, the catalog has 325 pages and contains a list of abbreviations of works cited, an index of printers and publishers, an index of book illustrators, as well as a provenance index and a general index. One of the major shortcomings, however, is the absence of an index of illustrations. Given that the catalog is meant to provide the history and description of the items in the exhibit, the lack of an index of illustrations is particularly crucial. In addition, the illustrations seem to be randomly incorporated in the whole, and it is laborious to find the corresponding description for each illustration. Moreover, many descriptions of artifacts have no corresponding illustration, and one wonders why only some of the artifacts are illustrated. Should it not be the role of the catalog to...

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