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Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity

2005; Oxford University Press; Volume: 120; Issue: 488 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cei388

1477-4534

David McKitterick,

Library Science and Administration

Lost Libraries: The Destruction of Great Book Collections since Antiquity, ed. James Raven (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004; pp. 294. £50). Iraq, Bosnia, Norwich, Florence. Recent major losses stick in the mind, and the list goes back to antiquity. This collection of essays is not just about those libraries, now ‘lost’, that have been bombed, burned or flooded, but also those that have been deliberately destroyed by more painstaking processes, such as the secularisation of Austrian monastic libraries, or the dismemberment of the great Jewish libraries of Poland and of France under Nazism. It is also about accidents having no negative connotations, such as the dispersal of miscellaneous royal collections in the Hanoverian courts, and their partial recovery—often more virtual than actual—from the shelves, records and other documents in Windsor and London. Crucially, this volume is also about neglect. In his wide-ranging and thoughtful introduction, Raven understandably begins with Baghdad, before moving on to the volume's wider purposes: to offer ‘new perspectives on what it means to lose libraries and great book collections’, to be ‘concerned with the consequences of library loss exactly because their study extends our understanding of aspects of social, political, economic, religious and intellectual history’. As he points out, there is much propaganda capital to be made out of exaggerating claims as to what has been destroyed on particular occasions. Perhaps one-tenth survives of the library of Matthias Corvinus. A much smaller proportion survives of English monastic houses. But, while loss is undeniable if integrity is destroyed by the dispersal of books, there is a distinction between that and outright destruction. This volume is the outcome of a conference. It is arranged in more or less chronological order, beginning with the late Jeremy Black, Lecturer in Akkadian at Oxford, on the libraries of ancient Mesopotamia. Four chapters are devoted to the late middle ages and the renaissance, including a thoughtful one by Richard Kremer on the disappearance—and also changing status—of the library of Regiomontanus. In later periods, Friedrich Buchmayr's contribution, on the secularisation of Austrian monasteries, will be of especial use to those unfamilar with the German literature, and Dominique Varry offers fresh material on post-1789 seizures in France. Clarissa Campbell Orr provides what she terms an outline of the current state of research on Hanoverian lost libraries—more in England than in Germany. Perhaps not surprisingly for a modern reader, some of the most disturbing pages are in the last group of contributions: on the late twentieth-century dismemberment of historic libraries belonging to Irish dioceses (‘no longer of meaningful use to the Church’), Sem Sutter's account of Jewish libraries lost during the Second World War, Rebecca J. Knuth's summary of the destruction of Tibetan libraries by the Chinese. In different vein, Rui Wang and Yulin Yang explore the stillborn Chinese Roosevelt Library, its site now occupied by the People's Library of Chong Qing. As a coda, Robert J. Fyne offers a summary of the most obvious of cinema documents, Storm Center and Fahrenheit 451. The geographical and chronological ranges are impressive and, notwithstanding Raven's hopes, the authors have generally chosen to follow their own paths. In the end, and despite the animus that often marks his introduction, the tone is more often elegiac, or one of resignation in the face of the historian's challenge to reconstruct.