On the History of the Archival Library and Scholarship in the West since the Alexandrian Library: An Overview

Abstract

We might approach the history of the textual archive, the archival research library, and the humanities in the West in the light of three major cultural/political turning points associated with three substantial changes – so-called ‘revolutions’ – in the textual condition. These changes are: first, the ‘Literate Revolution’ in Ancient Greece, and the eventual founding of the encyclopaedic Library and Museum of Ptolemaic Alexandria, based on Aristotelian doxography and text-critical editing ( ekdosis), and bibliographically controlled by the Pinakes of Callimachus, with its reincarnations in Late Antiquity as the Christian Library of Caesarea and the Bayt al-Hikma of Baghdad. Second, following the introduction and spread of printing – the ‘first revolution of the printed book’ – and of cultural nationalism and search for prestige/‘glory’ in Europe, we have the founding of the autarchic national research library and its archival base in the principle of legal deposit of printed texts, initiated in France with the Alexandrian state humanism associated with Guillaume Budé, its theorizing by Gabriel Naudé as an encyclopaedic universal library based on the doxographical concept of historia literaria, and bibliographically controlled by a Callimachean Catalogue Méthodique. But then, following the ‘second – industrial – revolution of the printed book’, we have the imperial climax of the autarchic national research library with Panizzi at the British Museum, his realistically ‘unmethodical’, alphabetical General Catalogue, and iconic circular, encyclopaedic Reading Room; itself to be followed and eventually overtaken by the more ecumenical United States Library of Congress. Third, following the ‘revolution in information technology’ during and after the Second World War we have the process of global, cooperative, potentially total digitization of the unmediated as well as mediated textual archive, with national libraries as ‘leading hubs’ of a unified, encyclopaedic network, associated with the idea of ‘the new Library of Alexandria’.