Stimmen

[Stimmen zu “Secularization and Monastic Libraries”]

Nigel Ramsey’s essay on the break-up of English monastic libraries in the sixteenth century makes a fitting bedfellow for the essay on Duke Humfrey. It also sets up all sorts of useful counterpoints with Friedrich Buchmayr’s fascinating piece on Joseph II’s secularization of monastic libraries in the Habsburg lands in the 1780s. In many cases, as Buchmayr explains, whole libraries were destroyed, sometimes by pulping; on the other hand other libraries survived, and there are more extant monastic libraries in Austria today than almost anywhere else.

Mark Purcell, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 100 (2006)