tige: PHILIP THE GOODof Burgundy, for instance, believing
he could trace his descent from the Trojans, owned no
fewer than 17 manuscripts that supported this claim.
Princely collections also often included handsomely illus-
trated manuscripts of historical and romance material in
verse or prose, written in the vernacular and used for pub-
lic reading aloud.
In the Middle Ages the scriptoria where manuscripts
were copied were attached to monasteries, and their out-
put was overwhelmingly ecclesiastical and theological and
therefore in Latin. Since the earliest days of Western
monasticism a library was considered an essential part of
a monastery, and the rule of St. Benedict stated that monks
were to borrow the monastery’s books for their personal
reading. Inventories and catalogues of library holdings
were regularly compiled; for instance, around 1400, a
Benedictine monk catalogued the libraries of nearly 200
religious houses in England and Scotland. John LELAND’s
notes made during his visitation of the religious houses in
1539–45 record the state of the English monastic libraries
immediately before the DISSOLUTION OF THE MONASTERIES.
Predictable mainstays of monastic libraries were glossed
Bibles and the works of the Latin Church Fathers; books
of saints’ lives, other theological works, and occasional
classical texts are also recorded; monasteries also made
numerous copies of service-books for everyday use by the
monks but these were often kept handy for the church,
rather than in the main collection. The great Bibles and
liturgical manuscripts with their magnificent illumina-
tions were always hugely expensive prestige products, and
the most that individuals of modest means could hope to
own was a book of hours to enable them to follow the
Church’s cycle of devotions (although books of hours
could themselves be richly decorated for wealthy patrons,
such as Jean, Duc de Berry (1340–1416), who commis-
sioned the famous Très Riches Heures).
While the embryo universities did not themselves im-
mediately start to form libraries, their individual teachers
and students undoubtedly did, generating a demand for
textbooks in the subjects being taught: theology, astron-
omy, philosophy, canon and civil law, mathematics, and
medicine. This in turn led to the secularization of the
scriptoria and the beginnings of a BOOK TRADEin cities
such as Paris, Bologna and Oxford. Library lists compiled
for universities and colleges are invaluable sources of in-
formation for the late medieval and early modern period
but need to be used with care as their survival has often
been a matter of chance and they certainly do not repre-
sent the whole picture. Bequests of books mentioned in
the wills of individuals are another source of information
on libraries, both private and public, and some institu-
tions even made it a requirement that their members leave
their books to them on their deaths. Colleges therefore
tended to amass book collections more readily than the
universities of which they were part; for instance, in 1363
the entire stock of books owned by the University of Cam-
bridge appears to have been just five, but 19 years later
Clare College received a bequest of 30 volumes from a cer-
tain Thomas de Lexham.
One of the earliest individual bibliophiles whose li-
brary had a definite humanist character was PETRARCH.
His activities as a collector are well documented, and he
was active in searching out copies of classical manuscripts
in monastic and other libraries with the aim of assembling
a complete set of Latin texts that had survived from antiq-
uity. One of his coups (1345) was the discovery of a copy
of CICERO’s letters to Atticus in the chapter library at
Verona. Over 40 of the manuscripts that Petrarch owned
have survived, such as his copy of Virgil’s Aeneid with the
commentary by Servius; this is now in Milan’s Bibliotheca
AMBROSIANA, founded in 1609 as a public library.
Petrarch’s friend BOCCACCIOfollowed his bibliophilic
example; on his death his library was bequeathed to the
convent of San Spirito in Florence. SALUTATI, BRUNI, and
BRACCIOLINIwere likewise avid collectors and assembled
superb libraries. Niccolò NICCOLI’s collection was pur-
chased on his death by Cosimo de’ MEDICIand became the
basis of the Bibliotheca MARCIANAin Florence. All these
men helped inspire the formation of the Medicis’ own li-
brary (later the Bibliotheca LAURENZIANA). Vespasiano da
BISTICCIalso played a pivotal role as agent and bookseller.
Major humanist collections were assembled for other
princes in Italy and beyond, including the VISCONTIand
SFORZAdukes of Milan, the ESTEin Ferrara, the GONZAGA
in Mantua, the Aragonese rulers of Naples, King MATTHIAS
CORVINUSof Hungary, and of course the papacy. From the
mid-15th century collections of Greek manuscripts came
to Italy with men such as Cardinal BESSARION, whose
book-collecting habit had been formed among the great li-
braries of Constantinople, and it was his massive collec-
tion of manuscripts that became the nucleus of the
Bibliotheca MARCIANAin Venice. In 1490–92 Lorenzo de’
MEDICI(“the Magnificent”) sent John Laskaris (1445–
1535) on a manuscript foray in the Levant, from which he
returned with around two hundred Greek manuscripts for
the Medici library.
To house these and similar later collections appropri-
ately major architects were commissioned to design pres-
tigious and lavishly appointed buildings. A surviving
example of a purpose-designed room for a ducal library is
the wood-paneled studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro
(1422–82) in the palace at Urbino, with elaborate trompe
l’oeil intarsia work depicting cupboards in which the
books were stored. In larger monastic or princely libraries
the medieval system for keeping the books—in two ranks
of reading desks ranged underneath windows at right an-
gles to the walls, with a central aisle between them—was
not immediately superseded. An example of this arrange-
ment is the Bibliotheca Maletestiana at Cesena, near Rim-
ini in Italy, a vaulted and aisled hall designed by Matteolliibbrraarriieess 2 27799