Nuti in 1447–52, which survives with its original furni-
ture intact. Books were stored on shelves below or above
the reading surface, chained to horizontal metal bars. Ves-
tiges of this plan, with shelving and benches set at right
angles to the walls on either side of windows, creating
bays, can still be seen in older libraries; two Oxford ex-
amples are the library of Merton College, originally built
1373–78, but refurnished under Sir Henry SAVILEin the
early 17th century and Duke Humfrey’s Library in the
BODLEIAN. Only in the last decade of the 16th century did
great libraries, such as that of the ESCORIALin Spain, begin
to have their books housed in lofty shelving built flat
against the walls.
Under the impetus of the new learning, enthusiasm
for book collecting spread to northern Europe. The
French invasion of Italy in 1494 saw the looting of the li-
brary of the king of Naples and Aragon, and CHARLES VIII
took many hundreds of its volumes back with him to
France. His successor, LOUIS XII, captured the Visconti and
Sforza collections on his campaign in Italy (1499–1500),
as well as using his great wealth to purchase other libraries
and commission the production of magnificent manu-
scripts. FRANCIS Iconsolidated the French royal collection,
shifting it from Blois to his new palace at FONTAINEBLEAU
and appointing the great scholar Guillaume BUDÉto the
post of librarian.
Library holdings could be augmented not only by
purchase, bequest, or looting, but also through dynastic
alliances. In Austria MAXIMILIAN I acquired important
manuscripts as part of the dowries of his two wives: Mary
of Burgundy, whom he married in 1477, and Bianca Maria
Sforza of Milan (1497). Maximilian did not keep his
books in a single purpose-built library, preferring to store
them in portable leather chests, but he did appoint a
major humanist figure, Konrad CELTIS, as his librarian. It
was in 1562, during the reign of Ferdinand I, that the
nascent Hofbibliothek acquired, via an agent in Constan-
tinople, the Codex Vindobonensis, the most magnificent
of the manuscript HERBALSto have survived from late an-
tiquity and one of the greatest bibliographical treasures of
all time, containing the illustrated text of Dioscorides
made in 512 for a Byzantine princess. However, it was not
until the appointment of Hugo Blotius as librarian in 1575
that an attempt was made to impose more regularity on
the records and operations of the imperial library.
With the advent of PRINTING, personal and institu-
tional collections expanded apace, and new patterns of ac-
quisition become discernible. While the purchasing power
of royal patrons brought about the creation of prestigious
libraries that form the core of modern national collections,
the scholars who were at the forefront of the new learning
accumulated impressive personal libraries of both manu-
scripts and printed books. Central to the humanist enter-
prise was the quest for good manuscripts of classical texts.
When such collectors died their books often found their
way into university and, later, public libraries. From the
early 16th century humanist interests began to be repre-
sented in academic libraries in addition to the standard
medieval theological and legal texts. In England, for in-
stance, Queens’ College, Cambridge, bought the humanist
library of Henry Bullock (died 1526), a friend of ERASMUS,
and Bishop Cuthbert TUNSTALLdonated books on Greek to
the university. At Oxford the original statutes of Corpus
Christi College, founded in 1517 by Bishop Richard Foxe
(c. 1448–1528) to train the clergy in Greek and Hebrew as
well as Latin, made provision for a library—the trilinguis
bibliotheca—that Erasmus predicted would become a
major attraction for scholars. Foxe wished the volumes to
be accessible to the students, stipulating that only the
most rare or valuable were to be chained, and his own
generous donation of books formed the basis of the col-
lection. The first library of the University of Oxford had
been founded by Duke Humfrey of Gloucester (1391–
1447), youngest son of King Henry IV and a noted patron
of learning; refounded in 1598, it is now known as the
Bodleian Library after its shrewd and generous benefactor
Sir Thomas Bodley.
Among the northern European humanists who
formed notable libraries, the Rhineland scholar Beatus
RHENANUSwas unusual in bequeathing his books to the
parish church in his home town of Sélestat (between
Strasbourg and Colmar); even more unusually, the collec-
tion, augmented by donations from Rhenanus’s humanist
associates, remains there. Housed in the Bibliothèque Hu-
maniste, it is a monument to a thriving intellectual net-
work of the first half of the 16th century. In the same
period another major collection was assembled by the
wealthy Nuremberg humanist Willibald PIRCKHEIMER; this
library fetched up in England in the following century,
having been bought by Thomas HOWARD, Earl of Arundel,
in 1636 and presented by his son to the Royal Society.
See also: LITERACY
Further reading: Francis Ames-Lewis, The Library
and Manuscripts of Piero di Cosimo de’ Medici (New York:
Garland, 1984); Albinia de la Mare and Richard W. Hunt,
Duke Humfrey and English Humanism in the Fifteenth Cen-
tury (Oxford, U.K.: Bodleian Library, 1970); Phyllis W. G.
Gordon (transl.), Two Renaissance Book-hunters: The Let-
ters of Poggius Bracciolini to Nicolaus de Niccolis (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Anthony Hob-
son, Renaissance Book Collecting: Jean Grolier and Diego
Hurtado de Mendoza, Their Books and Bindings (Cambridge
U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Lotte Labowsky,
Bessarion’s Library and the Bibliotheca Marciana (Rome:
Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1979); Konstantinos Sp.
Staikos, The Great Libraries from Antiquity to the Renais-
sance (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll Press and London:
British Library, 2000); Alan G. Thomas, Great Books and
Book Collectors (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975);
Berthold L. Ullman and Philip A. Stadter, The Public Li-22880 0 lliibbrraarriieess