Libraries were all the rage in Renaissance Europe, and no wonder. Theatres of knowledge, grandly decorated and proudly displayed, they hosted dramas of many kinds. Learned men used them for lively conversation on such irresistible topics as the philosophies of Hermes, Zoroaster and Pythagoras or relations between the later Roman Empire and the Persian king Shapur II, which Angelo Poliziano, Pico della Mirandola and others debated in the new Florentine library of San Marco. Yet they were also – or were supposed to be – places of quiet, intensive study. When the French jurist and antiquarian Claude Bellièvre visited the Vatican Library around 1514, he copied down a papal edict: readers must not quarrel, make noise or ‘cross the desks [to which books were chained] and tear them up with their feet’. Violators were threatened with permanent expulsion – the fate that befell the legendary polymath Pico when some of the theses he proposed for public debate were condemned. He had to return the books he had borrowed, along with their chains, before he fled the city. Happily, Lorenzo de’ Medici helped him take refuge in Florence, where he could slake his bibliomania in San Marco.
What made libraries so exciting? They were hardly novelties. Roman writers like Cicero and the two Plinies assembled rich collections of books in their city houses and country villas. Cicero wrote warmly of his librarian, Tyrannio, who put his books into order, and set the second half of his dialogues On the Ends of Good and Evil in the family library of his young friend Lucullus, which he hoped would equip the boy for public life. Medieval monks were fervent bibliophiles. In their cupboards, worn, faded manuscripts of the Latin classics and the Church Fathers flanked brand new Bibles and commentaries, beautifully written and glowing with rich pigments and gold leaf. Spectres of lost collections glimmered alluringly in the background – above all, the Alexandrian Library, famous for both its size and its fate.
Humanists knew that they were imitating the ancients when they sat and talked in libraries. But they knew little about what these lost collections looked like or included. After all, as Andrew Hui points out, even library terminology was slippery. Bibliotheca could refer to anything from a single compendious book, such as the Scriptures, to a single cabinet or a whole collection. Monasteries had large, sunny scriptoria (‘writing rooms’) where the monks created splendid codices. But the books themselves were generally stored rather than displayed. Monks borrowed them for use in their cells.
By the 13th century, universities were teaching not only the basic canon of the liberal arts but also more specialised fields such as natural philosophy, as well as the higher studies of law, medicine and theology. Previously unknown texts, translated into Latin from Arabic or Greek, arrived in the West and had to be evaluated and made available. Scholars split into schools, writing polemics against their rivals as well as textbooks on their subjects. Students and staff needed access to many books. New libraries met the demand.
In 1289, the Sorbonne officially founded a library that already possessed 1017 books; half a century later it had 1722. Size mattered, but not as much as organisation. The collection was divided into two rooms, a larger one for books of general importance and a smaller one for specialised texts. The librarians chained the general books to desks, which made it possible for students as well as lecturers to consult them. It was a working collection, designed for use, and many of its books were secular. They attracted readers and disruption. Richard de Bury, an English bibliophile who knew the Sorbonne collection well, warned librarians to keep students away from their books, since they ate cheese while they read and dribbled fragments onto the page. Yet despite such menaces – as well as the worse ones of fire, damp and vermin – innovative libraries rapidly took root. They developed into two distinct forms, one private and one public.
The modern private library or study, as Hui tells it, was devised by a single person: Petrarch. True, Christian hermits and monks had read in their cells for centuries, seeking above all to form themselves as spiritual beings and fighting the distraction that always threatened. As Jamie Kreiner showed in The Wandering Mind (2023), though the manuscripts of religious texts were often laid out with helpful marginal notes and signs to promote meditative reading, even pious readers often found it difficult to concentrate on their contents. Petrarch experienced this traditional form of reading and knew its pitfalls. In one of his dialogues, the Secretum, Augustine berates Petrarch for his failure to internalise the lessons of his books. When Petrarch explains that he must struggle against distraction, Augustine recommends that he make notes in the margin.
Petrarch wrote many notes and drew the odd picture. More important, he transformed reading into something new, a literary enterprise organically connected to his career as poet, philosopher and historian. Like Robert Graves, he admitted that he preferred certain books – the Latin classics and the works of Augustine – to others. In fact, he went so far as to make a list of his preferences, provocatively titled ‘My favourite books: I resort to the others not as a deserter but as a spy.’ And he created a refuge for himself in France, in the valley of the Sorgue, near but not in the papal city of Avignon. There, in his study, he worked through his weighty copies of Livy and Virgil, filling their margins with notes. The smaller books did not always stay in their places. Petrarch carried his copy of Augustine’s Confessions, a neat, tiny manuscript that a friend had given him, everywhere – even, he claimed, to the top of Mount Ventoux.
Learning from Cicero, Petrarch made himself a fluent and vivid letter-writer. He cultivated intimate friendships at a distance and then collected and edited the letters that recorded them for his readers. The ancients not only served as models but became his companions. He wrote to contemporaries but also to Cicero himself (whom he reproached for his involvement in dirty Roman politics), Livy and Virgil. The study became for him what the tavern, printing house and café would become for later generations of writers: the place in which he refreshed himself and stored up facts and impressions. The library made possible a new kind of intellectual life. Machiavelli, when he’d been exiled from Florence, described a later version of this life in a splendidly ironic letter to Francesco Vettori: in the morning, he read one of the poets while seated by a spring; in the afternoon, he killed time with his neighbours at the tavern; at night, he conversed with the ancients in his study.
Petrarch’s new literary life became a model, but not every learned humanist shared his tastes. Niccolò Niccoli, scion of a wealthy Florentine family, spent his fortune on a spectacular collection of some eight hundred books, many of them newly discovered classics. He studied these in a small, elegant house, eating his meals off crystal plates and contemplating ancient busts and other antiquities. But the Petrarchan model was an inspiration, not a cage. Niccoli kept his library in the city, not in the country. And though he offered other humanists grouchy critiques of their Latin, he also lent out his precious books, so freely that, as a friend remarked, ‘his house was thought to be a sort of public library’ (on his death it became, as he had hoped, the nucleus of the library of San Marco). Christine de Pisan, the daughter of the French court astrologer, was a prolific and eloquent writer who published her own works in handsome manuscripts. She had her illuminators depict her at work in a small but impressive room. Christine read the ancients, but she paid even more attention to moderns such as Boccaccio and Petrarch. And she demanded entrance for other women, ancient and modern, into the world of books, earning a place at Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party centuries later.
Where the bohemians find attractive quarters, the gentrifiers will follow. By the middle of the 15th century, the good and the great found their way to the study. Traders and bankers like Iris Origo’s merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, had long kept their account books in private rooms. In the 15th century they gave up the old-fashioned houses in which their ancestors had lived and traded, with shops open to the street on their ground floors, and built closed palaces with splendid façades. The rulers of Italian cities, and the clerics, bankers and ambassadors who settled in capital cities, did the same. Modern palaces, often the size of a city block, were imposing. Though they were no longer open to all, they weren’t entirely closed to the public: employees and clients, along with projectors hawking investments and artists seeking patrons, flocked into them, hoping for a moment’s access to the owner’s ear. It was hard to hide. Their rooms were not aligned on corridors but opened into one another. Leon Battista Alberti and other architects found a solution: they advised their patrons to build studies.
These refuges, ideally next to the owner’s bedroom, provided something new in patrician life: handsome, personalised spaces. They were not private in a 21st-century sense. As Alan Stewart showed long ago, rulers and patricians often shared them with their secretaries, with whom they planned invasions, plotted love affairs and sometimes talked about books. In Urbino and elsewhere, study walls were covered with intarsia panels, in which inlaid woods of many kinds provided funhouse images of what a three-dimensional study should contain: books, globes and musical instruments, portrayed with perfect perspective and foreshortening. Other studies glowed with paintings by famous, and fashionable, artists. Isabella d’Este collected spectacular mythological images by Perugino, Mantegna and others, as well as a substantial library, to decorate her study at Mantua. There she discussed further acquisitions with Pietro Bembo and other friends. Painters found the new study, with its clean, gleaming floor tiles, its handsome revolving bookstands, its globes and candlesnuffers, an irresistible subject. The Virgin Mary had always been imagined as a virtuous and diligent young woman, who devoted herself to reading pious books (notably, according to one tradition, the life of the Virgin). Renaissance painters began by portraying her at the Annunciation, facing the angel Gabriel, book in hand. Gradually they ensconced her in a study of her own, with handsome shelves and an impressive library.
Hui attends above all to the imaginative uses that writers made of these spaces, real and fictional. He brings us into Montaigne’s tower room, which still exists, its beams inscribed with Greek and Latin proverbs, and invites us to watch him compose his Essays, their pages freighted with stories and passages from Montaigne’s wide reading. Several chapters take us into the fictional studies of Don Quixote, Prospero and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Here Hui reveals the dangers that attended the modern study, as others had attended the cell. Its owner could mistake his or her books for reality, like Quixote; retreat into them and lose power and status, like Prospero; or, like Faustus, simply become lost in an inevitably futile search for the secrets of life, the universe and everything. The study, as imagined and represented, was a fine and private place – more private than most real ones, and more dangerous.
Studies and libraries existed in many cultures. Hui’s book is all the richer for its insistence on taking the reader, like a modern Mephistopheles, across the world. In China scholars developed a culture of the study that was, in many ways, more subtle and complex than the European versions. Yet these too were connected by more than their owners’ imaginations to global systems of trade. Colourful rugs from Persia covered their tables while seashells and porcelain from China glittered next to their books. Even Joseph Scaliger, the model polymath of the late Renaissance, who worked longer days than his supposedly industrious Dutch neighbours and complained that he could not afford all the books he wanted, boasted of the stuffed bird of paradise that Amsterdam merchants had given him – though he also noted that it lacked a head. ‘If it had been whole’, he grumbled, ‘they wouldn’t have given it to me.’
As in China, so in Europe, many libraries grew much larger than individuals’ studies. Seth Kimmel tells the story of two collections that aspired to universal coverage: the vast library that Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus, amassed in the first decades of the 16th century as he travelled across Europe before settling in Seville, and the even richer one that Philip II of Spain created as part of the Escorial, the huge, grim complex that he built in the 1560s on a plateau around fifty kilometres from Madrid, to serve as a monastery, school and palace.
These were not Renaissance Europe’s first new comprehensive libraries. Ambitious collections that centred on the kinds of books that Petrarch and Niccoli had collected began to take shape in the middle of the 15th century. They usually sprang up inside ecclesiastical institutions, but did not serve their ends exclusively. What began as a new library for a Franciscan convent in Cesena, in Emilia-Romagna, turned into an innovative library shaped like a basilica but configured, with rows of desks, for study rather than prayer. It was a church of learning, lit by high windows on both sides and open to the whole city. The Vatican Library, founded at the same time by Pope Nicholas V, occupied a set of four rooms, each with its own purpose. It too was open, if not to the public, at least to all members of the papal curia. And it too was a secular, humanistic collection inside an ecclesiastical institution. It soon became an intellectual adventure playground where readers could encounter stunning texts that had been inaccessible for centuries: for example, the history of Thucydides, translated into Latin for the first time by the Roman scholar Lorenzo Valla.
Colón’s enterprise grew from these models but departed from them in multiple ways. His father had been a strikingly bookish man, who drew the inspiration for his voyages to the west from the inaccurate but fascinating description of the world by the French theologian Pierre d’Ailly, which he covered with marginalia. Along with his taste for reading, Colón inherited vast wealth, and with it he scoured the publishers and bookshops of Europe. A creature of print, he felt at home in busy cities in which new texts constantly appeared and publishers produced pamphlets, broadsides and tavern signs, lurid in design and popular in appeal, as well as erudite folios. He wanted them all and stalked the cities of Europe to hunt them down. His collection became huge. Where the wealthy and learned Augsburg jurist Konrad Peutinger owned ten thousand separate titles in two thousand volumes, Colón amassed somewhere between fifteen and twenty thousand items.
Cataloguing and organising these collections was not easy. Librarians had to rewrite their handwritten inventories from the start when new acquisitions mounted up. In manuscript collections like the early Vatican, books seen as most likely to be useful were chained to desks, which eventually bore signs listing their holdings. But many were stored in chests and cabinets. If a scholar wanted to make a systematic search of a great library’s contents – as the classical scholar Jean Matal and the learned spy Georg Tanner both did in the Vatican and other Italian libraries in the middle of the 16th century – he had to make an inventory of his own, desk by desk and item by item. As such collections swelled with printed books, it became harder to manage their contents.
Colón envisioned his library as a vast and accessible information machine. He recorded details about the acquisition of every book – date, place, price, even the exchange rate. And once he settled in Seville, he tasked his assistants with creating a series of finding aids, including content summaries for every book and a system of hieroglyphic marks that would indicate each book’s subject immediately, enabling readers to cut their own paths. He dreamed of safeguards that could ensure the survival of his collection: iron cages, for example, in which readers could see and turn the pages of books without being able to remove them. In the end, the independence that made Colón’s enterprise possible also spelled its ruin. Those he left in charge let the collection fall apart: thousands of books were lost, sold or stolen, and the pioneering finding aids were scattered. A Canadian historian, Guy Lazure, rediscovered one of them a few years ago in Copenhagen, inspiring new efforts by Edward Wilson-Lee and others to reconstruct this lost paradise of books.
Though Colón aspired to encyclopedic knowledge, he concentrated – as Kimmel shows – on one sort of information: geographical data of all kinds. He collected this from every possible source. A trained pilot himself, he helped the Casa de Contratación (the House of Trade with the Colonies) examine candidates for pilot status. He bought up-to-date maps and city views from the best cartographers and printmakers. And he scrutinised texts of every kind, from modern cosmographies to Homer’s catalogue of ships, for whatever information they could provide about peoples, places and their names. Partly inspired by his example, a tradition of innovative geographical and antiquarian research grew in Spain. Combining extensive fieldwork with research into texts and documents, Spanish scholars traced the history of their land since Roman times in granular detail.
The library of the Escorial, as Kimmel shows, drew on all these traditions and more. The scholars who took part in the discussions about its future form had studied the ancient libraries of Alexandria and Rome and worked in the great Italian collections. The historian Juan Páez de Castro, the jurist and antiquarian Antonio Agustín, and the biblical scholar Benito Arias Montano, who became the first librarian of the Escorial, knew not only how the Vatican Library was organised but also how it was heated, and they gossiped about great collectors like Diego Hurtado de Mendoza, who had sometimes bought duplicate copies of the same work – and often made exaggerated claims for the age of his manuscripts. Long before Philip II began work on the Escorial, Páez de Castro had written a description of an ideal royal library, as richly equipped with maps and globes as with books. He envisioned it as consisting of both manuscripts and printed books – even condemned ones, which could be sequestered and only made available to those who needed access to them.
When the library began to take shape and the books needed to be placed, these men debated ways to arrange and catalogue its holdings. Agustín preferred a simple, global finding system. He suggested that the Inquisition simply ‘castrate’ a copy of the Protestant Conrad Gessner’s alphabetical Bibliotheca universalis, a weighty compilation first published in 1545, and annotate it to serve as a catalogue. After all, he pointed out, worthless books like the novella Lazarillo de Tormes had been thought worthy of expurgation by Catholic censors. Why not repurpose the much more useful work of the Swiss humanist and heretic? Montano, however, preferred to divide the books among the many, many disciplines they belonged to, and did so during his spells of work on cataloguing (even though his system worked badly for the many works in Hebrew, Arabic and other ‘Oriental’ languages). Some innovations found more imitators: for example, the architect Juan de Herrera’s decision to push the bookshelves back against the walls, making both the libraries’ contents and its splendid frescoes of the liberal arts more visible to readers.
Many scholars have scented in the complex decoration and fulsome contents of the Escorial evidence of an intellectual system – perhaps an esoteric one – that framed it. Kimmel argues that the library was designed to embody Montano’s conviction that the Scriptures, when rightly interpreted, could provide all the truths of ancient geography, and the library’s decoration, when rightly understood, would enable readers to find their way to these mysteries and then to commit them to memory. Montano traced the presence of the ancient Hebrews in Iberia and elsewhere; he held that the ships King Solomon sent to bring gold from Ophir had sailed to what the native inhabitants of the Indies called Peru. These subjects were clearly a focus of the library’s collections. Montano’s research had a deep impact on his friend, the cartographer Abraham Ortelius, and on Spanish scholars like the lexicographer Sebastián de Covarrubias.
However, as Kimmel shows, the most remarkable addition to the Escorial’s holdings came with no planning at all. Early in the 17th century, French pirates stole the library of the Sa’adi sultans of Morocco, compiled by the erudite Ahmad al-Mansur and his sons. The books arrived at the Escorial in 1614. This collection of almost four thousand books, amassed by learned Muslim princes whose models for collecting ranged from the Ottoman sultan’s library in Istanbul to the Escorial itself, included both religious works and specimens of the vast philosophical and scientific enterprises of the Islamic world. Book catalogues (faharis) and teaching licences (ijazat) came from both Muslim Andalusia and the Maghreb. These texts – extended lists of authors and their works, as well as certificates confirming that a particular scholar had studied a particular religious work with the proper masters and could teach it – were central tools of Islamic bibliographical scholarship. Though not accessible to general readers, these guides and the varied texts that they came with enabled a small group of specialists who worked in the library and their pupils ‘to see something like the taxonomy of knowledge in Islamicate societies displayed in the three dimensions of the Escorial library’s shelves’ – at least until a library fire destroyed many of them in 1671.
The Escorial, like Colón’s library, sponsored a distinctive programme for the mapping and description of space. Yet it also had much in common with other great libraries that were founded or rebuilt across Europe, in the decades just before and after 1600: the Bodleian Library, but also the University Library in Leiden, the rebuilt Vatican Library of Sixtus V, the Ambrosian Library in Milan and many more. They were usually created to serve locals, whether students, professors or courtiers. But chance, force, greed and generosity swelled their resources. The collection of books in Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic and other ‘Oriental tongues’ that Scaliger bequeathed to the Leiden University Library – one of the Protestant counterparts to Philip’s very Catholic Escorial – was far smaller than the Sa’adi collection but better known and publicly displayed. Kasper van Ommen has argued that it made Leiden a pioneering research library: not a petrified forest of known books, listed, labelled and chained to their desks, but a mysterious space that enticed scholars from across Europe to explore it, not knowing what they would find or if they would emerge. The Escorial was part of this larger movement.
Many universities have now emptied their libraries, ‘off-siting’ the books and installing collaborative study spaces. Many scholars and writers prefer to read and write not in purpose-built spaces lined with groaning shelves and decorated with improving images, but in coffee shops. Of their own libraries, they could say, with the cheerful pedant Kulygin in Three Sisters, omnia mea mecum porto – their reading matter stored in tablets and Kindles, phones and laptops, and carried with them. Yet libraries still provide adventures, and of more kinds than ever. Kimmel eloquently evokes the European and American collections where he recreated the ways of early librarians, guided by their modern counterparts. Hui, studying early modern Europe in postmodern Asia, notes gratefully that ‘digital Ariels are quicker than transoceanic container ships.’ Petrarch, who carried his pocket-sized Augustine up the mountain, would have loved both our travel grants and our handheld devices. Perhaps Prospero and Faustus would both have been happier if they could have summoned our digital Ariels. As for Don Quixote, though, if he had been newly created in 2025, he would certainly be squaring off against AI.