The Politics of Booklists
High medieval booklists are routinely interpreted as administrative sources that existed to inventory book collections, somewhat similar to present-day library catalogues. Historians, however, have found them curiously unreliable and impractical. A case study of the Benedictine monastery of St. Lau...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
openjournals.nl
2024-12-01
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| Series: | BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://bmgn-lchr.nl/article/view/17248 |
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| Summary: | High medieval booklists are routinely interpreted as administrative sources that existed to inventory book collections, somewhat similar to present-day library catalogues. Historians, however, have found them curiously unreliable and impractical. A case study of the Benedictine monastery of St. Laurent in Liège suggests a different approach to booklists. The thirteenth-century St. Laurent booklist was used, I argue in this article, to position the library as a centre of trinitarian expertise, fundamentally orthodox, and highly respectable. In order to do so, the booklist had to strategically neglect several books that might detract from the image of a perfect library. Booklists such as those from St. Laurent were, therefore, complex mixtures of the administrative with the political, and should be studied as such.
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| ISSN: | 0165-0505 2211-2898 |