Early Modern Libraries

W epoce nowożytnej w Europie miało miejsce ożywione zainteresowanie
greckimi ojcami Kościoła. Ich pisma były zarówno intensywnie przekładane
na łacinę i języki nowożytne, jak i wydawane. Artykuł przedstawia wybrane
przykłady starodruków z Biblioteki Jagiellońskiej z XV i XVI wieku z kolekcji osób lub instytucji związanych z Krakowem, zawierających dzieła greckich
autorów patrystycznych jako świadectwo zainteresowania nimi wśród osób
nauki i Kościoła w Polsce nowożytnej. Zagadnienie to rozpatrywane jest również w kontekście wymiany intelektualnej między Europą a Polską.

Infrastructure development strategies are essential for modern libraries to adapt to the rapidly changing needs of users and technological advancements. This paper examines the various roles that these
strategies play in improving user experience, fostering sustainability, fostering collaboration, integrating technology, and enhancing accessibility. Libraries can create environments that promote learning and collaboration by emphasizing community engagement and user-centered design. Additionally, a variety of funding options promote long-term financial sustainability, and data-driven decision-making guarantees that infrastructure investments are in line with community needs. In the end, good infrastructure development strengthens libraries' status as essential community resources in the digital age while also improving library
services.

Archiwum parafii św. Katarzyny Aleksandryjskiej w Wolbromiu nie było dotychczas obiektem gruntownych badań pod kątem źródłoznawczym. Jednakże z przechowywanych w nim dokumentów korzystało wielu historyków, m.in. w pracach na temat Wolbromia 1 czy ziemi olkuskiej w okresie staropolskim 2. Powstało także kilka mniejszych artykułów, praca magisterska o ludności miasta w XIX i XX w. na podstawie ksiąg metrykalnych 3 , czy wreszcie praca licencjacka autora tego artykułu 4. Księgozbiór zgromadzony w wolbromskiej parafii, pozostały po wolbromskim klasztorze kanoników regularnych laterańskich (dalej: CRL) (Ordo Canonicorum Regularium Sancti Augustini Congregatio Lateranensis Sanctissimi Salvatoris), był kilkukrotnie obiektem badań, m.in. w pracach nt. kultury książki w wolbromskim zakonie CRL 5 , czy też bibliotek parafialnych w dekanacie wolbrom-* doktorant na Wydziale Humanistycznym Uniwersytetu Pedagogicznego im. Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Krakowie, pisze pracę doktorską pt. "Chrześcijańska ludność miasta Kazimierza pod Krakowem w XVIII wieku"; zainteresowania badawcze: demografia historyczna, genealogia, fotografia archiwalna;

The Polish Herbal, published in 1595 by the canon of Sandomierz, Marcin of
Urzędów, was the frst original Polish herbarium. It is given the greatest value among
all works on plants published in Krakow in the 16th century. Research on the bi-
ography of Marcin of Urzędów and the herbarium content has been going on for
almost two centuries within various sciences: history of botany, pharmacy, medicine,
history of culture, or historical bibliology, as well as linguistics in the feld of nature
nomenclature. Despite the accumulation of factual information about the work of
Marcin of Urzędów, the state of knowledge is still unsatisfactory due to the disper-
sion of sources. The aim of the article is to present and analyze the state of research,
its weaknesses and unquestionable achievements, which may be the starting point
for a monographic approach to the herbarium and a full biography of the clergyman

The present study theorizes the ornamentation of the Laurentian Library’s vestibule as early modern architectural rhetoric and examines how architectural design constructed societal norms pertaining to articulation and eloquence, influence and power. I frame the Laurentian Library and its Medici manuscript collection as apparatuses that challenged and legitimized perceptions of the Medici’s constructed nobility and overbearing political identity. The study unfolds one manner in which early modern Florentine art production centralized around Medici patronage to glorify their lineage and the emerging Tuscan duchy.

Queen Barbara Radziwiłł’s Courtier Wawrzyniec Jelitowski and His Books
The article discusses a list of sixteen books making a part of the post--mortem inventory of Wawrzyniec Jelitowski’s belongings. This lists is one of the oldest registers known that shed light on the books in possession of the Polish nobility.
Jelitowski was Dispenser at Queen Barbara Radziwiłł’s court and died a few weeks after the queen, on 1 August 1551. The inventory was made and inserted into the records of Cracow Justice at the request of Jost Ludwik Decjusz the Younger, an influential personality of Cracow’s elite of the day, whose pro-Reformation sympathies were widely known. Treasurer of the King’s Court, Jan Lutomirski, who patronised Jelitowski’s career, also openly declared his support for the Reformation. This sparse sixteen-book collection comprises Catholic and Lutheran prints, and Protestant literature is seldom mentioned in the city’s documentation of the 1550s. The Apologia veræ doctrinæ, published in Wittenberg in 1538, seems to have been  unique print available in Cracow that testifies to the interest in the Unity of Bohemian Brethren and their mediaeval pre-Reformation tradition. The books on rhetoric that are listed in the discussed register were widely used in Cracow for educational purposes. Jelitowski’s library confirms the widespread interest in Reformation literature amongst the court elite, despite the royal ban on purchasing and circulation of such prints. Owing much to the inspiration of Church authorities, including the Cracow cathedral chapter, anti-Protestant edicts were reissued throughout the reign of the two last Jagiellonian monarchs.

Administrators of the Nawarzyce parish from 16 th to 19 th centuries T he source presented for edition comes from the collections of the Diocesan Archives in Kielce. It lists and describes the activities of 17 th parish priests in the Nawarzyce parish over the course of four centuries (from 16 th to 19 th centuries). This document had not been previously published and exploited to a greater extent by historians. It greatly enriches our knowledge about the Nawarzyce parish and the clergy working in it, bringing a lot of interesting information about the conflicts of local priests with owners/leaseholders of parish villages about their tithe, the tribute in kind (meszne) or the right of propination, disputes with the executors of the wills of priests who died in Nawarzyce, as well as about the parish temple.

Most of the surviving medieval book collections in northern Europe were initially formed by religious communities. During the Reformation, they frequently became for the reformed institutions: universities, schools and municipal book collections, a kind of book depository and cornerstone for new libraries. After the secularisation of monasteries, friaries and convents the books once owned by these institutions or by individual monks, friars and nuns served pastors, professors, students and urban intellectuals. As the present study will demonstrate, during the late sixteenth century there were also instances when the books of old Catholic religious communities became the property of new ones, the colleges of the Jesuit Order. The use made of the books did not necessarily differ between followers of different beliefs. Some of these medieval books owned by Protestant or post-Tridentine Catholic institutions were meant to be forgotten and reused as raw material; they lay on the shelves unused, waiting for their parchment leaves to become binding material for works of Protestant or Counter-Reformation Catholic authors.

The Riga Jesuit College was founded in 1582/1583, on the visit of King Stephen Báthory of Poland-Lithuania (1576-1586) to Riga. The College library was formed both from manuscripts written in monasteries in the pre-Reformation time and printed books purchased by the Jesuits. Reflecting the denominational fragmentation in Riga and the Duchy of Livonia, as well as the situation in Riga at that time, the library contained both Catholic and Protestant texts. After the region of Latvia that is now Vidzeme came under Swedish rule in 1621, the activities of the Jesuits were terminated and the library was transported to Sweden, where in 1477 its core was brought to Uppsala University, founded in 1477. After 1620, a library was established at the university and the collection from the Riga college became one of its cornerstones. During the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), a range of Jesuit libraries and book collections of other Catholic institutions in Central and Northern Europe were also brought to Uppsala. They came from Braunsberg (Braniewo), Frauenburg (Frombork), Posen (Poznań), as well as from Olomouc, Würzburg and other cities. 1 The college was operating at the time that the oldest surviving Latvian-language texts were printed: the Catholic catechism (Vilnius, 1585) 2 and two parts of a Lutheran handbook (1586/1587), 3 with the second edition of the handbook printed in the Riga city printing house, founded in 1588 by Nicholas Mollyn (also Mollin, circa 1550/1555-1625). 4 This is not the only library that Latvia has lost due to wars and changes of the ruling powers. In 1701 the Swedes took the library of the Duke of Courland from Mitau (Jelgava) to Riga and in 1714 it was transported further to St. Petersburg 5 and later, in 1829 parts of it were further transferred to Helsinki. During the First World War, the evacuated library of the Riga Polytechnical Institute (founded in 1862) ended up in Ivanovo and other cities in Russia, never to be returned back to its original location. In 1919, with the withdrawal of troops of the West Russian Volunteer Army, under the command

The Cracow Archdeaconry Parish Priest and His Social Milieu at the End of the Seventeenth Century in the Light of a Post-Mortem Inventory
The article discusses the inventory that was compiled before 24 September 1694 as a result of the settlement of accounts, including those of the funeral, of the late Rev. Kazimierz Wolfowicz, rector of the parish of Racławice near Cracow. He was born to a wealthy family of this city and died most probably at the end of 1693 or at the beginning of 1694. This source is unique in its richness of information concerning the social milieu of the Lesser Poland clergy that is their noble and clerical neighbours, manorial servants, and their contacts with the nearby towns, primarily with Cracow. The register lists the priest’s books that must have been used at church on a daily basis and also sheds some light on the equipment of the manor. Rarely have such informative documents been employed in the studies in the Little Poland Church’s history, and the article shows that further research in the field seems possible and promising.

This thesis examines an institutional library in the remote southern Moroccan village of Tamgrūt, established in the mid-17th century by the founder of the Sufi path al-Nāṣiriyya, Maḥammad b. Nāṣir (1603-1674), and his son Aḥmad b. Nāṣir al-Khalīfa (1647-1717). To explore their motives for and interest in collecting books, I evaluate Ḥamīd Laḥmar's library catalog (2013), focusing mainly on manuscripts copied before 1720 and their copyists, and a selection of manuscripts, which I studied on site. By examining the library, I hope to demonstrate the material and intellectual connections between different regions of the Islamicate world in the early modern period and to situate the Nāṣiriyya within a transregional network of knowledge flows.

On the eve of the Thirty Years War rulers and learned communities in the German territories were quite aware of the necessity to treasure and guard their cultural and historical heritages, i.e. the private, university and monastery libraries and archives. Especially monastic libraries and archives, since the take-off of the Reformation, had often been – out of several reasons – in danger of getting transfered or even dispersed and destroyed.
In territories, such as the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, the dukes therefore assigned learned figures to chronicle the histories of several monasteries by using the monasteries’ own archival material in order to, not least, contribute also to the history of the lineage. A side-effect of this practice was that considerable amounts of monastic library and archive holdings (and the knowledge that they were offering) became condensed and implemented into the historical works and chronicles which were assigned by or addressed to the dukes. In many ways these works, regularly provided by rectors and historians of the local monastic and Latin schools, turned out to be the real guardians of local tradition and historical knowledge in early modern Lower Saxony. Many of these works became afterwards the quintessence of monastic libraries and archives which, by the turn of the seventeenth century, had already started to fade.
One of these cases appears to be the Chronicon Walkenredense (1617) written by Heinrich Eckstorm (1557‒1622), rector and pastor at the monastic school in Walkenried, which in 1593 had come under the rule of Brunswick-Lüneburg and thus became a target of the ducal archival politics. Eckstorm held close contact to the academic milieu of the local university in Helmstedt and to other near lower schools, such as in Ilfeld. This paper aims to elaborate on his methodological concept in using early modern monastic archives to produce historical writings. Eckstorm’s chronicle was, in many respects, a state-of-the-art product in not only local historiography and archival practice but also Lower Saxon politics at the beginning of seventeenth century.

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Link to the whole volume at Brepols with table of contents and list of contributors:
https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503605975-1

The article discusses the cure of souls in the Kielce Provostry in the
sixteenth century. The source-base comprises the 1529 benefice taxation register of the Cracow Diocese, the records of the local consistory court, the Kielce collegiate parish registers, which date back to the 1560s, and the 1590s visitation protocols.
There were twenty-nine parishes in the territory under the provost of the Kielce collegiate chapter. It was predominantly a rural area with only seven towns, whose economic and administrational roles were limited to
the demesnes in which they were located. With a few exceptions, the local landowners were ecclesiastical institutions, first and foremost the Bishop of Cracow, the Benedictine monastery of the Holy Cross and the Cistercian monastery at Wąchock. Thus Reformation ideas did not spread in the Provostry, in contrast to neighbouring lands, where noble patronage played a key role.
The parish benefices in the Provostry of Kielce were among the best endowed in the whole diocese. The majority of pastors employed curates, usually one, though occasionally two. The number of parishes with curates fell from 79 to 62 percent between the 1520s and the 1590s. In 1529, 44 percent of curates enjoyed higher incomes than the Provostry average, but in 1597 parish priests with above-average incomes constituted only 27 percent. There is no straight correlation between the level of parish incomes and the decision to employ a curate. Although the salaries of the lower clergy were usually only around 15 percent of the overall annual parish revenues, there was no move to
raise them. Salaries were supplemented with fees for administering sacraments, but all we know about them is that they were on the decrease throughout the century. The salaries of the Kielce lower chapter that substituted for non-resident canons and prelates constituted only 16 per cent of its total annual income. The curates’ testaments confirm the impression that generally, if their lives were far from luxurious, they were certainly not poor.
The majority of rectors and curates in the Provostry were born to burgher
or peasant families of the Cracow diocese, and those of noble birth constituted at most 20 percent. The lowest reaches of Polish society completed elementary education at most, hence mass literacy was uncommon. As no more than 15 percent of the Provostry clergy enrolled at Cracow University, training under the guidance of the local parish priest was the only route to ordination for most of them. The lower clergy were aware of the importance of books for the cure of souls, and a breviary, not necessarily the Roman Breviary, was commonly
relied upon. Pre-Tridentine liturgical manuals were in use in some parishes down to the end of the sixteenth century. Rarely did visitations list sermon collections, which suggests that the priests must have relied on homilies published as part of diocesan guides (agendæ). Parish and private libraries were usually small, mostly containing only liturgical manuals and books useful on an everyday basis; catechisms are rarely mentioned.
There is no straight correlation between the variety of books in the parish library and the quality of the cure of souls, as is demonstrated by the case of the Kielce collegiate parish. From the 1560s through to the end of the century the six to eight local chapter vicars exercised care only over a minority of local parishioners, perhaps some 5,500. In 1597–98, religious brotherhoods were active only in around 20 percent of parishes, and efforts to expand their activities were frequently in vain.
It was clearly difficult to engage parishioners beyond Sunday mass attendance, and to do more than persuade them to memorise the rudiments of the faith and contribute to bringing offertories. In the second half of the sixteenth century, religious life in the Kielce Provostry was still to a considerable extent a continuation of the mediaeval world, in which the programme of reform was limited to the strengthening of Church discipline.

This was a presentation at a workshop at the University of Osnabrück, Germany, dealing with early modern scholars' working libraries, mainly from the 16th-18th centuries. Johann Wolfgang Goethe's personal library is a late outlier, but still serves as an interesting example.

Spicae Salernitanae. Notes on Book Collections in Medieval Salerno Deduced From Selected Manuscripts of Chronicles.
This article begins with a concise discussion of previous scholarship on the book collections in Salerno in the Middle Ages and early modern times as witnessed by inventories and extant manuscripts. Three of those books are then discussed in more detail. MS BAV, Vat. lat. 3973 (the oldest copy of the Chronicon of Archbishop Romuald of Salerno) was kept in Salerno until the beginning of the 17th century. Medieval glosses in the margins of the manuscript illustrate the ways it was used by Salernitan readers. A 14th-century miscellany of early medieval Southern Italian writings (including the Chronicon Salernitanum), now MS BAV, Vat. lat. 5001, was probably copied in Salerno from a similar manuscript, which is referred to in the opening clause. One among the copious glosses left by late medieval readers makes reference to a book held in the cathedral archive in Salerno. Early modern copies and excerpts prove that the miscellany was frequently consulted before it left Salerno at the end of the 16th century and, passing through the hands of the Colonna family and Cesare Baronio, entered the Vatican Library. Between 1548 and c. 1554 a notary from Salerno, Johannes Simo Marescalchus, put together a miscellany, which is now Naples, National Library, MS XXII.52. He drew upon three different exemplars, two of which were kept in the cathedral archive (a glossary copied from Vat. lat. 5001, and a calendar), the third belonged to the Franciscan convent in Salerno (a collection of Southern Italian chronicles).