German Town Libraries of the XVthe and XVIthe Centuries

Before the close of the sixteenth century, Augsburgh, Dantzic, Hamburgh, Lubeck, Treves, Ratisbon, Halle, and Goerlitz,–as well as Ulm, Frankfort, and Nuremberg,–possessed Town Libraries which were already objects of municipal care, as well as memorials of the beneficence and public spirit of individual citizens. The still more earlyfounded Town Libraries of Ulm, Frankfort, and Nuremberg (all of which date from the fifteenth century,) had been greatly improved and reorganized. The libraries of several of the towns and cities first-named had had their beginnings in small collections of MSS. given or bequeathed to churches, long before the dawn of the Reformation. Sometimes the donors of these were ecclesiastics; sometimes they were laymen. But it was mainly owing to the mental energy of the German Reformers, and to the latent intellectual sympathies which were by them aroused into vigorous life, that the duties of an educational sort which devolved upon towns in their corporate character were brought into prominence. The Reformers made it manifest that the communities were bound to make (or to help to make) a public provision of the silent teachers of mankind, as well as to provide, or to contribute towards providing, the stipends of schoolmasters.

In Germany, as everywhere else, those who promoted the good work had to struggle against an abundant measure of inertness and indifference. They had–as educationists and thinkers always have–their hard battle to fight with the obstinate adherents of the old routine.