Leuven University Library, 1425-2000 (review)

This is a big and expensive book about the tumultuous past of the Leuven University Library. It is a paean to the place of a university library in the life of a six-hundred-year-old university. The work of the editors, Chris Coppens, Mark Derez, and Jan Roegiers, is crisp; the artistry of photographers Bruno Vandermeulen, Paul Stuyven, and Leopold Oosterlynck is impeccable. The graphic quality of the book is a tribute to the university press community and to Hilde Lenas and Dirk van den Auweele of the Leuven University Press in particular. And as is the case in so much of scholarly communications today, the unsung heroine may be Mrs. Ardis Grosjean-Dreisbach, whose patronage made possible this intricate compilation.

Leuven University is an important Belgian university, even though it is not one of Europe's first universities or among its very finest. The history of the library, like that of the university itself, reflects the geopolitical reality of the region, its fortunes rising and falling across half a millennium with the wars and intrigue that beset the area. At least twice during its history the main collections were destroyed by war and fire, and in recent times it has been split asunder by the linguistic and cultural divisions in Belgium itself. The library has been renewed each time in the traditional manner through patient acquisitions, purchase of private libraries, and gifts of generous donors.

As was the case with so many other universities originating in the fifteenth century, Leuven owes its establishment to the partnership of church and state and to the active role of the townspeople, who paid the salaries of faculty in those first decades after its founding in 1425 and provided the space for teaching and learning. By the sixteenth century Leuven was a leading intellectual center on the continent. Today Leuven University reflects the nature of its origins six centuries ago, as—instead of a distinctive central campus—its classrooms and other buildings spill throughout the town that has nurtured it. Throughout the text the editors do a good job of defining the relationships of the university to the faculty, the town, and the state and religious powers that have had a hand in sustaining it over time.

The book's organization meanders like a lazy river. Picture portfolios that may be the strongest feature of the volume delineate each of the eight chapters. Only a few pages are devoted to the first five hundred years of the library's origin and maturation. By page 120 we have been transported by the authors to the twentieth century and introduced to the perils of warfare (the library sacked by the German army twice) and political destabilization. But these first pages are enormously instructive, recalling earlier studies on the origins of university libraries as the inevitable extension of the tradition of the classroom lecture and the professor's reliance upon a very small number of authoritative texts. Slowly, something resembling a definitive library collection began to take shape in Leuven. The very first university statutes addressed the need to ensure that books reached students and faculty. The colleges themselves, mirroring practices elsewhere, also took steps to build the resources required for teaching and learning, with the Faculty of Arts purchasing a collection as early as 1438. Equally important were the significant libraries built up by professors to support their own teaching, many of which made their way into the college libraries or otherwise sustained the intellectual lives of generations of scholars. One legal scholar, for example, had amassed a personal library of some eight thousand volumes at the time of his death in 1687. The careful narrative documenting the rise of the Leuven libraries is brilliantly complemented by the photographs of the early libraries and the treasures found on their shelves. Through periods of growth and times of devastation this cyclical process of building (and rebuilding) a research library is carefully documented.

Growth...