Ancient Libraries and Renaissance Humanism: The De Bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius

Abstract

Thomas Hendrickson's The De Bibliothecis of Justus Lipsius is a scholarly introduction, translation, and commentary on the noted and influential history of ancient libraries by Justus Lipsius (1546–1607). Going beyond the story of mainly Egyptian, Greek, and Roman libraries, Lipsius also used his book to promote the need for general, nonsectarian research libraries and institutions, all the more necessary in the intensely competitive religious arena of the time. De bibliothecis (maybe more commonly known as De bibliothecis syntagnma) first appeared in 1602 and had some twenty-four editions—many of which, we are told, are now available online—but previously there were no studies of how the publication changed over time nor any adequate critical translation. Hendrickson gives both the original text and a new translation on the facing page, while his introduction and extensive commentaries flesh out the meanings of the Lipsius text and offer a more current but nonnarrative understanding of these libraries. In focusing on an individual if important manuscript, his bibliography presents a wealth of specialized textual studies. Readers wanting more on ancient libraries themselves might read Olof Pedersen, Archives and Libraries in the Ancient Near East (CDL Press, 1998), Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (Yale University Press, 2001), or Yun Lee Too, The Idea of the Library in the Ancient World (Oxford University Press, 2010).Lipsius was a noted Humanist scholar of somewhat flexible religious principles able to move professionally across the all-important Catholic–Lutheran–Calvinist divides of the day, not unlike some other historians and librarians like Peter Lambeck or for that matter Lipsius's successor at the University of Leiden, the great Joseph Scaliger, neither of whom figures in Hendrickson's story, but he does conclude that Lipsius “was a Stoic whose homeland was ancient Rome” (4).The only previous English translation was by the American public librarian John Cotton Dana, whose access to sources and Latin were both severely limited, relying more on a French translation that used a different version of the text, so this Hendrickson work is doubly welcome. De bibliothecis is itself sometimes more quotations or lists from classical sources than a strict recounting of libraries and librarians as identification of texts was the main interest of bibliophiles and librarians at the time. Hendrickson received his Ph.D. in classics at UC Berkeley and appears very informed on the sources and subsequent works. He points out that writings about libraries in the ancient world should be seen as contemporary metaphors “for ambition, political power, military dominance, and religious authority” (12).De bibliothecis was both a historical survey of non-Christian ancient libraries and a plea for princely funding of research libraries that had little result in the Netherlands but did influence the creation of the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana in Milan in 1609. “There is,” Hendrickson comments, “an irony in that Lipsius's goal in writing the DB seems not so much to have been the creation of a major work of scholarship as the inducement of a wealthy donor to fund a library” (165). The book was published by the famous Plantin house, a point explored at least briefly by Hendrickson. He presents an ingenious chart of the relationships among the various authorized and unauthorized editions, which gives useful insights to publishing in the early seventeenth century. Hendrickson's main purpose is to bring scholarly edition of De bibliothecis to a modern audience. Despite the cost, this book is worthy of consideration at all major historical collections and graduate library schools.