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  • Introduction: Medieval Libraries, History of the Book, and Literature
  • Luke Sunderland

Medieval libraries are studied as collections of books, but much less frequently as collections of ideas. They are somewhat neglected by literary scholars, who tend to define the parameters of their studies in terms of authors, genres, themes, traditions, or movements, rather than library collections. Such critics are interested in where individual texts come from or where they go, and much less in which texts were gathered together in libraries and thus made sense together. Studies have increased awareness of the intertextuality of medieval literature, especially of the interplay between literature and philosophy in the later Middle Ages: medieval literary texts were of course in dialogue with other sorts of knowledge.1 But the potential for using popular literary texts — the incontournables of medieval libraries — to inform an idea of what those libraries symbolized, or how they were conceived or used, remains unexploited. Nor has the medieval library been deployed to make sense of the texts found within it, despite the fact that the meaning of any text is inevitably informed by familiarity with the other works alongside which it is found. Rather, History of the Book has been the main field to tackle medieval libraries. Scholars in that domain show well how people needed, made, or used books. Patronage, ownership, lending, and production are central foci as the histories of particular manuscripts and the activities of makers and collectors are documented. Meaning is found in the physical forms of writing, or in the structure and presentation of manuscripts, including paratextual features, such as rubrics and marginalia.2 But History of the Book’s statistics-driven approach, reliant on empirical data, remains epistemologically cautious and runs up against natural limits where such information is sketchy or unavailable. History of the Book is interested in the supply and demand of books as objects; it has [End Page 159] concentrated on tracking and measuring book ownership.3 But it lacks the ‘human contexts for the production and reception of texts’.4

Expanded to the level of the library, the positivist approach of History of the Book shows its limitations more clearly. The library is reduced to being a symptom of the processes of production; thus Jenny Stratford and Teresa Webber note the tendency to focus on individual books and owners, due to lack of evidence about how books were ‘perceived, acquired, or used as collections’.5 Although sociological questions, such as taste and temperament, can be answered via knowledge of the economics of the book trade, this tends again to tabulated data. Codices become mere figures in defined lists of knowable facts, and the library is viewed as the aggregation of these facts, a bigger data set. Hanno Wijsman’s recent work on the libraries of Burgundian nobles, for example, carefully records the ownership of texts in particular languages and genres. He shows how the ducal library, in the later Middle Ages, was

geared to secular use and the representation of worldly power […]. The book in the noble library now becomes chiefly a source of secular knowledge and identity and is no longer predominantly in the service of the culture of prayer.6

This is precisely the kind of reductive claim about texts — which are made monochromatic — that dominates the field. The nature and dynamics of this ‘secular knowledge’ remain unexamined. Elsewhere, the same answers are peddled: aristocratic libraries contained standard corpora; they reflected the noble world view; they manifested wealth and status; they served political, dynastic, or crusading aims.7 Scholars in History of the Book quite rightly criticize the tendency of scholars in other fields to disembody medieval texts — that is, to treat them outside of the context of the books in which they circulated8 — but History of the Book in turn focuses on the embodiment of the texts to the detriment of the texts themselves. It flattens texts for which multiple readings and resonances are possible, and sidelines the capacity of works to create and disrupt their own systems of meaning.9 Medieval libraries have thus become part of social and economic history, without being properly integrated into the history of ideas. History [End Page 160] of...

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