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.
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