When Knowledge 'Squared' was Knowledge Shared. Strategies to Cope with the Excess of Data in Early Modern Library Catalogues.

In the European pre-modern book world it is not easy to distinguish between references to a library catalogue, a bibliography, an index, an inventory, or a list of authors or titles bearing more specific names, such as a nomenclator. In practice, the words were for the most part interchangeable, and the theories and practices related to the compilation of different types of list were also analogous. Having them in one’s hands is helpful to providing more concrete definitions. From a material perspective we are dealing with objects containing records of other objects, books listing other books. Besides that – to paraphrase the historian Giorgio Riello – catalogues, like inventories, are lenses through which one can see beyond what they list: through their structure and content we are afforded a glimpse in a set of social norms, and enabled to gain an idea of the political and epistemological implications related to their compilation and something of the subjective aims of their creators. The value of library catalogues lies not only in their accuracy or in the originality of their proposed hierarchy of disciplines but also in the vision of knowledge they convey. From this perspective, as I hope to show in the following pages, the visible strategies invented and deployed between 1570 and 1650 by scholars acting as librarians to deal with changes, losses, disorder and constraints of space will allow us to challenge a restricted discourse of order, of the library as a systematized mirror of a unified world and the catalogue as a mirror of a specific library, and highlight some rifts in what historians have often reconstructed as a linear process of knowledge management, from early modern to modern times. Library catalogues, then, their materiality and their epistemology, are the objects of this study. The catalogues chosen also delineate a specific chronology. In 1571 Albrecht V of Bavaria bought the library of the rich merchant Johann Jakob Fugger and transferred it from Augsburg to the Ducal Library in Munich, founded in 1558, and already containing the private collection of the orientalist Johann Albrecht Widmannstetter. From this moment on, a massive enterprise of ordering and cataloguing a stock of about 11,000 volumes was undertaken. As testimony to this enterprise we have about twenty surviving catalogues from 1571-1582. After Albrecht’s son, William V, moved the library to a new location, Duke Maximilian I launched an ambitious project to gather together in the Munich library catalogues from every monastery and prelature in Bavaria, in order to collect historical sources regarding the history of his territories and to exercise a certain control over the books belonging to the religious institutions. This, along with new acquisitions of private libraries, must have contributed to an increasing feeling of huge quantities of materials converging towards the centre of knowledge and of power – and a lack of time and space to catalogue it all. In the middle of the Thirty Years War, shortly after Maximilian acquired the title of Prince Elector (1623) and a few years before a part of the ducal library was removed by the Swedes, a young Gabriel Naudé published his Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque (1627), which would be an influential guide to establishing libraries in the future. I will not be looking closely at Naudé’s Advis here, but merely take note of it as an early indicator of a changing sensibility in the making of catalogues, at the beginning of an era in which the generally chaotic situation evident fifty years before was not yet resolved but at least was being ‘domesticated’ with a set of strategies – this despite the reshuffling of cards and book collections during the Thirty Years War. Furthermore, some of the ideas that Naudé proposed in 1627– such as that the best ordering of a library is the “easiest, least intricate, most natural, most used”, and on whether subject catalogues should be related to the position of books on the shelves, are visible in certain initiatives at the beginning of the new century, and also in one of the last Munich catalogues that I consider here, drawn up in 1655.