The public library and late humanist scholarship in early modern Europe: Antiquarianism and encyclopaedism

The dissertation explores the intellectual structures underpinning the spread of the public library through Western Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Divided into two main parts, it examines the concept of the public library as it emerges in two separate but intertwined bodies of historiographical and encyclopaedic texts. The first part locates the public library within the new intellectual dominance granted historical research, or erudition, in early modern historiographical thought and practice through studying antiquarian investigations of the libraries of both classical and Christian antiquity. The new intellectual importance of the public library is shown to be deeply imbedded within humanist notions of literacy. For the classical antiquarians the public library of antiquity was seen to function as an archive of authentic literate instruments used by classical historians themselves; the existence of libraries and archives in antiquity was seen to effectively guarantee the legitimacy of the historiographical tradition. For ecclesiastical historians, the library of Christian antiquity was also seen to have archival functions, but the implications were much greater. Emphasising strong traditional links between the administrative and historiographical functions of the library in Christian antiquity, the library was seen to guarantee not only an effective historiographical past for the Church, but also to legitimate on documentary grounds various confessional claims to its contemporary administration. The library thus became an essential locus of confessional contestation. Part two examines the development of library economy and historia literaria within these antiquarian and confessional contexts through studying the works and careers of two seventeenth-century scholars, Gabriel Naude and Peter Lambeck. It is shown that Naude developed the field of library economy by building on the antiquarian notion of the archival library but that he proposed a conciliatory alternative to the confessional library. Lambeck is seen to have combined practical aspects of book-knowledge with a pragmatic, encyclopaedic ideal of scholarship in developing the discipline of historia literaria. The work of both men is seen to have implications for the development of a historiography of philosophy, the history of eclecticism, and the eighteenth-century fortune of historia literaria.