University Libraries in the 12th to 15th Centuries: Growth and Development

Copyright © 2005 Ned Fielden

This work may be duplicated for educational or non-commercial uses as long as this copyright notice and proper attribution are made.

The growth and development of universities beginning in the 12th Century can be regarded as a major legacy of the Middle Ages. Although university library collections were initially small, they came to have an important role in the measure of a society's stance towards learning and education. This study looks at university library development, drawing insights into broader intellectual movements. Library organisation was influenced by the printing press and responded to the nature of education at the university level. A look at library catalogs, regulations, and their role within university life illuminates the role of books, libraries and learning during this time period.

Introduction, University Foundation and Growth, and Library Evolution

This study is an attempt to trace the evolution of libraries, particularly those associated with universities, from the 12th to the 15th centuries. Factors to consider include: the size of collections, who was using the libraries and how, the management and organization of the collections, and how the libraries influenced the flow of scholarly communication. Some insights may also be gained from considering the libraries as reflections of broader societal trends.

Rashdall in his monumental work Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages states “The universities and the immediate products of their activity may be said to constitute the great achievement of the Middle Ages in the intellectual sphere.” (Rashdall 1987, 3.) For many of us, the university is the main legacy of the middle ages, the most important thing from that time to survive to the present.

As the 12th century progressed, a shift from monastic centers to towns brought increasing vitality to the larger towns and small cities in much of Europe. One by-product of this movement was the embryonic development of studia generale, and students began to gather around one or more master teachers for instruction. The mid to late twelfth century saw the rise and recognition of several “founder” universities, led by institutions at Paris, Bologna and Salerno.

Universities of Europe 12th-15th Centuries. © 2003 Christos Nussli, Ned Fielden

The establishment of formal organizations that grouped the different constituencies of university life, with student guilds at Bologna and masters’ guilds those of Paris, formed the basis for the two basic university archetypes. Initially there were no permanent buildings to house university life of any sort. Masters taught out of their homes or rooms rented for that purpose. Typically instruction took the form of masters reading from texts

while students listened. Disputation was an essential element for both faculty and students. Clearly there was a great need for the texts of instruction, while the limits on availability of texts were considerable. Yet this was also a time of transition, a shifting of ideas from a scribal book culture to one in which Illich described as the “lifting text off the page.” Reading, beginning in the 12th century, was becoming a more active tool of learning. (Illich, 1996)

Books were scarce, expensive luxuries, and only the most wealthy students were able to own their own copies of texts. Any early university library collections were modeled on the monastery and cathedral libraries that predated the formation of the universities, so let us consider something of the monastic libraries before proceeding further.

Monastery Libraries

As any modern book collector knows, a small collection does not usually call for a great deal of attention from an organizational standpoint. A large 12th century library might total a few hundred volumes, and collections of that size often did not even benefit from a catalog, rather more commonly they just had a shelf list. Monastery libraries were somewhat analogous to contemporary archives in that the collections were site specific, idiosyncratic, and organised mostly for the librarian or keeper’s convenience rather than for any user’s needs. Thompson. Gottlieb’s ground breaking study of library catalogs listed some 70 library catalogs for the 12th century, 60 for the 13th, 114 for the 14th and 219 catalogs from the 15th century. (Gottlieb, 1890 cited in Kibre, 1946) which gives some suggestion about the growth of collections during this period. Early catalogs, when they existed, were minimal affairs, typically listing the first line of the second and penultimate pages, and if any further information was added, it was likely to include cost, which was essential if the book was to be loaned, or perhaps the name of the donor, a common means of collection augmentation.

As collections gradually crept up in size during the 12th century, the need for better record keeping which involved greater detail and organization increased. Despite their small size, collections in monasteries and colleges were usually divided into at least two parts: the “public” main collection, and the books for instruction. Usually the public area’s items were chained to lecterns or desks, and the lending collection kept in a different room or area, in locked amaria or presses. This is an example of a lectern from the church of St. Walburga in the Netherlands, which dates from the mid-15th century but is one of the only remaining examples of the early lectern model. (Clark, 1909, 154)

Clark notes that in the medieval period, all libraries were “public” in one sense of the word. Books were meant to be used and the monasteries and cathedrals would lend their books frequently, with a pledge, often an amount at least equaling the book’s value. This arrangement was used, at least in some cases, by universities.

Method of chaining books, The Care of Books.

University Libraries

Let us look at some of the ways that people, particularly university students and masters, used books during this time period.

University libraries for the first few centuries of their lives were closely akin to their monastic or cathedral counterparts, factors that were reflected in their architecture and furniture. (Clark 1909, 131-170) Many universities did not have central collections but if they employed the college model, the colleges kept working collections for their residents. These were typically very small, and did not increase markedly until after the printing press.

One example of a college’s library may be useful. The college of Peterhouse at Cambridge in 1344 had a regulation that directed its collection be kept in cabinets which had two locks and any item contained therein could only be lent out under the supervision of the two key holders, in this case the master of the college and the senior dean. (Clark 1909, 134) This arrangement was identical to the handling of books in numerous monastery libraries of that time or earlier.

Queen’s college at Cambridge listed 192 volumes in 1472, while Merton College of Oxford supplied its twenty fellows in the early 1500s with about 500 books. (Fletcher, 1984, 166.)

The late fifteenth century saw a rapid rise in construction of new library buildings, which found different expression in different parts of Europe. Until this time, few permanent buildings were designated as part of universities, and it is not until now that larger university libraries begin to be common. The method of storing the books changed to accommodate more items, and Clark called it the “stall system.”

It is fairly clear that usage of the college and university libraries was increasing during this time. At Oxford, a petition to request funding for increased library space to Humfrey Duke of Gloucester in 1444 spoke to the unmanageable state of affairs in the library then: noting that “should any student, be poring over a single volume, as often happens, he keeps three or four others away on account of the books being chained so closely together.” (Annals of the Bodleian Library, 7 cited in Clark , 171.) The new libraries needed to make better use of space, and a new more useful method of storing books came into being.

Stall system at Corpus Christi Oxford

The Care of Books

Northern Italian Carrel (Cesna) The Care of Books

Pecia System

As a counterpoint to the libraries, let us examine another parallel development from this period, the pecia system. Even before the advent of

the printing press in 1456, the need for more copies of texts had been increasing, and in at least some places, elaborate and highly effective mechanisms had evolved to efficiently increase the availability of texts to students and scholars. Pollard (1978, p 149) finds evidence that the pecia system existed in a formal arrangement in at least eleven universities: Bologna, Padua, Verceli, Perugia, Terviso, Florence, Salamanca, Naples, Paris, Toulouse, and Oxford. Law students in particular needed suitable numbers of accurate copies.

The 13th century saw development of book copying on a large scale. A copyist would work off a standard authorised pecia, distributed to scribes, and the stationer who employed the copyist would sell or even rent the item to students for small fees. Students often would rent only long enough to make their own copies (Thompson 1939, 637.) Bologna, Padua, Paris all had well entrenched pecia systems by the mid 13th century.

The stationers were one of the thriving businesses that developed in areas adjacent to universities, and were often supervised by them. There were rules that only correct copies could be made and the stationers could not capriciously rates or even distribute to other universities. By the 14th century the standards had become even more rigorous.

Lerner notes that this pecia system kept university libraries from attaining the heights that they would reach later. (Lerner 1998, 84.) For many students, especially if they were not associated with a college, the lending libraries really were the stationers, and in the case of law books at Bologna, statues stipulated that “any doctor or scholar may be required to supply his own copy” for purposes of students copying the work.

Printing Press

The advantages and impact of the printing press have been written about as much as almost any other renaissance topic and I will not venture far into the literature. The impact the printing press had on culture and intellectual life is difficult to overstate. Two main points are particularly relevant to library history, especially in universities, the first and most obvious being the great proliferation of accurate texts. Size of university libraries changes dramatically in this time period although there are still difficulties in working with the scarcity of accurate catalogues. Secondly, the press gave a huge boost to the dissemination of works in vernacular languages.

This is a chart illustrating the growth in the size of collections during the middle ages to early modern times. It is clear that the ceiling of about a thousand items held up with very few exceptions until shortly after the printing press’ arrival in 1456. It is only after 1500 that we start to see libraries of any description that list much more than a thousand items, and the numbers grew very, very quickly. For example the Vatican library in 1300 listed 443 manuscripts in its collection. By 1500 its catalog held over 3,500 items, an increase of nearly a factor of ten in 200 years. Schottenloher notes that 50 years after Gutenberg’s first offering there were already 30,000 printed works included in some 300 million copies in Europe alone. (Schottenloher 1989, 105.) By one reckoning in 1472 the number of printed pages had already exceeded the number of pages written in the manuscript era. (Flood 2003, 139) citing Neddermeyer. (Neddermeyer 1998.)

Yet the incunabula period, the first hundred years of the printing press’ life, did not see a great change in the content of the books produced. Mostly the classics were reproduced, led by the bible but also major works by Augustine, Boethius, and the like. Private collections, which presumably reflected the tastes of individuals a little more closely than university library collections, revealed as a major trend the increasing use of vernacular languages instead of Latin. In particular, increasing numbers of Greek texts, from historian Herodotus to Galen, Hippocrates, and Euclid, found their way into collections as they were reproduced with the new technology. Indeed Eisenstein notes that “Furthermore the output of early presses drew on a backlog of scribal work; the first century of printing produced a bookish culture that was not very different from that produced by scribes.” (Eisenstein 1979, 26) The most extensive, and aggressively growing, collections tended to be connected to royal courts or nobles. Pico della Mirandola listed 1190 items in the fifteenth century, one of the larger collections (Kibre 1946, 258-260.) The Duke of Urbino in the late 15th c had a catalog with 1104 items. (Lerner 1998, 101.)

Libraries, and the role of librarians, became more specialized. While with smaller collections the monastery and cathedral libraries could employ a monk or librarian who was little more than a clerk, one of the consequences of the printing press was the extraordinary strides that librarians made to make their collections more useful. Even the use of the alphabet as an organizing device, not unheard of but uncommon in the 14th century, became a standard. The person generally described as the ‘father of bibliography’ Johannes Trithemius, was the abbot of an isolated monastery in Sponheim, who compiled an unprecedented list, the Liber de Scriptoribus Ecclesiasticis, a three thousand page work of authors and their titles in 1494. This could not have been possible in the period before printing. (Eisenstein 1979, p 94.)

However in other ways libraries did not always have a happy time in the 16th and 17th centuries, as collections in England took a beating in the period of the suppression and continental libraries were often in the way during the 30 years war. Oxford and Cambridge became the only real public libraries in England for over two centuries.

Summary

At first university libraries closely paralleled their monastic analogues. They were slow to grow, and functioned chiefly as an educational role for their students and masters. They provided access to the main texts of instruction, although there were other mechanisms in place for students to obtain copies of the essential texts. Once the printing press arrived, the first fifty years of printing mostly served to increase the number of classics available, but soon the production of vernacular languages increased as well. The printing press succeeded in handling a great need at the time for accurate copies of individual items. Libraries found increasing attention with the rise of Humanism, but it was not until the German and Scottish university reformations of the 18th century that university library collections would attain a heightened research status, which they retain today, rivaled only by large centralized state libraries such as the British library, the Bibliothèque Nationale and the US Library of Congress.