Epilogue: Medieval Libraries in the Sixteenth Century: A Dream of Order and Knowledge

In 1698, the English doctor Martin Lister visited Paris. The library of the abbey of Saint-Victor was one of a number of sights he described:

I see the Library of St. Victor: This most Antient Convent is the best seated of any in Paris; has very large Gardens, with shady Walks, well kept. The Library is a fair and large Gallery: It is open three days a week, and has a range of double Desks quite through the middle of it, with Seats and Conveniences of Writing for 40 or 50 People.

The Catalogue was not finisht, nor intended to be Printed; which yet I think is always necessary in all Corporations, for check of loss of Books, for the Use of Strangers, for benefactions.

In a part of it, at the upper end, are kept the Manuscripts; they are said to be 3000, which though not very ancient, have yet been found very useful for the most correct Editions of many Authors. This is one of the pleasantest Rooms that can be seen, for the Beauty of its Prospect, and the Quiet and Freedom from Noise in the middle of so great a City.¹

The reading room that Lister saw had been the result of the development and rebuilding of the library of Saint-Victor in 1508; such developments were not uncommon in this period — the library of the Sorbonne had already undertaken a similar project a few years previously, in the 1480s. As part of that expansion, not one, but two library catalogues were commissioned by the Abbot of Saint-Victor and composed by Claude de Grandrue in 1514. Lister is correct in saying that they remained unpublished at the time of his visit, a fact that Ann Blair explains by noting that ‘most medieval library catalogs were designed for local use by those tending a collection of books’ and that ‘[m]ost early modern library catalogs remained in manuscript and followed medieval patterns’.² Blair also goes on to explain the organisational principles of such handwritten catalogues: ‘many favored an organisation by discipline, perhaps close to the physical arrangement of the books, with or without an additional alphabetical index by author or title’.³ Grandrue’s catalogues conform exactly to the pattern Blair describes: one lists items alphabetically by author, the other by their physical arrangement on the library shelves, an arrangement itself similar to many others in the late medieval and early modern period.⁴ First in order of importance in Grandrue came the three senior disciplines of theology, law and medicine, with history following on as the most dominant topic among the remainder of the call marks. Those searching for French literature in the vernacular among the catalogue entries had to be content with meagre fare: one manuscript (Paris, BnF, fr. 22551) containing Le Roman de la Rose, along with Jean de Meun’s Le Codicille; two other manuscripts with copies of Alain Chartier’s Le Lai de paix and of Gace de La Buigne’s Des Desduis de la chasse; but the Lamentatio of Christine de Pisan and the prophecies of Merlin both in Latin; and — among these, the most influential ‘French’ text of all — the Ovide moralisé, whose significance is underscored by Miranda Griffin’s article in this special issue.⁵

A clear order and organization of knowledge emerges from Grandrue’s catalogues; they fulfil the tasks of identifying, classifying, and locating books within a strictly hierarchical framework. Such arrangements were of prime importance to readers, who were admitted to Saint-Victor, as Lister notes, three days a week. Reading underwent a corresponding transformation. The library of Saint-Victor was not intended for occasional consultation, even less for recreational use, but as a place of serious study with a view to greater understanding of its collections and particularly to the production of new works based on those collections. Lister himself points in that direction when he says in the passage quoted above that the library’s manuscripts ‘though not very ancient, have yet been found very useful for the most correct Editions...