Gathering Fragments and the History of Libraries
by Pierre Chamber-Protat
Fragmentology: A Journal for the Study of Medieval Manuscript Fragments
Volume I | 2018 | 65-81
The state of collcections and their history (pp. 73-76)
(excerpt)
The very conservation status of a collection can preserve information about its origins and ultimately the circumstances of previous dispersions. The mere fact that Lyon’s box of fragments exists, for example, is noteworthy. When one has a book in hands and a leaf or a quire falls out, one picks it up and put it back in the codex: the worst that could happen would be not to put it exactly in the same place. Here, however, we have a box containing several fragments, as if its gatherer did not know where else to put them, even though they actually belonged to codices preserved in the same library. It suggests that these several books were damaged at the same time: their bindings were weakened all at once, and detached leaves were shuffled together. Some violent episode may have happened to this library, an event that damaged codices unevenly: some remained pretty much untouched, but some disappeared completely; some lost only small parts, and some were almost completely destroyed, surviving only in small fragments. After the event, the pieces that were substantially still codices were carefully gathered, but the detached leaves and quires that had fallen out could not be easily sorted; no-one could know at first sight which fragments belonged to which codex, or even if their codex was even preserved. Thus the fragments were put together in waiting, in what later became the MS Lyon 788.
This violent event can be identified. Lyon’s map from about 1550 shows us the cathedral’s fortified quarter, a few years before the Wars of Religion broke it open. [25]
At the end of April 1562, over one night, the Protestants took over the city without a blow. In the cathedral quarter, the canons dug in, but since the Protestants had seized the city’s weapons, all resistance was soon crushed. Then, expecting the royal army’s counteroffensive, the Protestants called on help from the infamous Baron des Adrets, remembered to this day for the vandalism and massacres he committed in the region of Lyon. Over the weeks of military occupation, Lyon’s cathedral and the chapter’s buildings suffered from accidental or deliberate destruction. [...]
The number of fragmented manuscripts and the way these fragments were scattered add to this body of evidence, conjuring up images of a fire and vandalism, followed by plain and simple looting. More than a century after the violent event of spring 1562, Étienne Baluze must have stumbled upon a batch of fragments from Lyon’s cathedral library. How? where? when? Through whom exactly did he find them? Did he know their origin? It is impossible to say for now; but maybe more information could be found in Baluze’s personal papers, the ‘Baluze’ collection in Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
I should also emphasize that this paper only investigated fragments from the ninth century or prior, whereas their fragmentation and dispersion actually happened in the early modern period. Obviously, Lyon’s library had grown in the meantime, and obviously the 1562 events affected manuscripts young and old. Given how the gatherings of older fragments match and complete one another, and given the fact that these very volumes also preserve younger fragments, one can safely assume that a lot of the post-ninth-century fragments from Baluze’s collection also come from Lyon’s cathedral library and have not been identified as such yet. Thus, conservation status becomes — not a proof, of course — but an indication, and possibly a strong one, of the provenance of a given fragment. In this regard, studying fragments together, with dedicated tools adapted to their specific features, as Fragmentarium does, opens the way to new perspectives, new questions and new answers regarding book history and the history of libraries; our very cultural history.
Writing 'I', 'we' or the passive voice
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