More Shopping OptionsThis pioneering volume of essays explores the destruction of great libraries since ancient times and examines the intellectual, political and cultural consequences of loss. Fourteen original contributions, introduced by a major re-evaluative history of lost libraries, offer the first ever comparative discussion of the greatest catastrophes in book history from Mesopotamia and Alexandria to the dispersal of monastic and monarchical book collections, the Nazi destruction of Jewish libraries, and the recent horrifying pillage and burning in Tibet, Bosnia and Iraq.
James Raven is a Professor of Modern History, University of Essex.
Introduction--J.Raven * Lost Libraries of Ancient Mesopotamia--J.Black * Aristotle's 'Peripatetic' Library--T.K.Dix * Text to Trophy: Shifting Representations of Regiomontanus's Library--R.L.Kremer * The Corvina and the Lost Hungarian Archive--M.Rady * Respect for the Dead: The Dispersals of the Library of Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester--D.Rundle * 'The Manuscripts Flew About Like Butterflies': The Break-Up of English Libraries in the Sixteenth Century--N.Ramsay * Secularization and Monastic Libraries in Austria--F.Buchmayr * Lost Royal Libraries and Hanoverian Court Culture--C.Campbell Orr * Revolutionary Seizures and their Consequences for French Library History--D.Varry * A Plague of Books: The Disappearance of the Diocesan Libraries of the Church of Ireland--M.Connolly * The Lost Jewish Libraries of Vilna and the Frankfurt Institut zur Erforschung der Judenfrage--S.C.Sutter * China's Roosevelt Library--R.Wang & Y.Yang * China's Destruction of the Libraries of Tibet--R.J.Knuth * Burn the Books--R.J.Fyne * Index
