Introduction

Abstract

This article serves as the framework for the forum on the history of libraries, presented at the Making of the Humanities conference in Somerville College, the University of Oxford, in September 2017. The article offers an overview of the development of books and libraries, primarily in the Western world, with emphasis on the physical book—including the supports on which texts are written—within the library. The library as a locus of scholarly communication with present and past authors and its cataloguing and delivery systems are discussed. The conclusion returns to the role of the library as related to questions of ephemerality and the preservation of knowledge. The three contributing papers and one section of the introductory paper provide examples from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries of humanistic and ecclesiastical-humanistic Italian libraries and their intellectual, social, and political milieux; sources of patronage; and roles in the intellectual life of their times.