Reconstructing Libraries

The Literary Products of any Era can be fully understood only in the light of the texts and contexts of which they form a part. As a discipline, the history of ideas traces the movement of knowledge, transferred in texts or by the process of instruction and education in general. The history of the transmission of texts, both the media by which they were transmitted and the institutions in which they were preserved, has been a focus of intellectual history over recent decades. Ideally we would always like to know exactly which texts — whether those literally being consulted or those stored in memory from previous reading — an author had at his or her disposal during the writing process. The sources for such information are varied, incompletely preserved, and often hard to track down. The reception of the texts themselves can be traced to a greater or lesser extent via direct and indirect references in other texts in the form of quotations or notes. Texts were discussed and information about them disseminated in printed journals or unprinted correspondence. A degree of understanding of the historical and local contexts in which they were read and the way in which they were used by individual readers can be gained from those readers’ marginalia and from taking note of their provenance.Books and manuscripts are preserved as artifacts in libraries and archives. These institutions themselves have checkered histories, which are often difficult to reconstruct. The fact that texts are traded as commodities in the form of books means that few collections have ever been static. The history of large libraries necessarily encompasses the history of a great number of individual collectors and collections, and its reconstruction is dependent on the archival material available, on detailed records of acquisitions, and on the survival of earlier inventories and catalogues. Library and auction catalogues give information on the size and contents of collections and provide insight into the popularity and geographical distribution of individual texts. The investigation of book ownership and the reconstruction of libraries provide a necessary basis for studies in intellectual history, just as knowledge of the organization of collections gives insights into changing ideas about the systematization of knowledge.