ABSTRACT
This book presents the collectors’ roles as prominently as the collections of books and texts which they assembled. Contributors explore the activities and networks shaping a range of continental and transcontinental European public and private collections during the Renaissance, Enlightenment and modern eras. They study the impact of class, geographical location and specific cultural contexts on the gathering and use of printed and handwritten texts and other printed artefacts. The volume explores the social dimension of book collecting, and considers how practices of collecting developed during these periods of profound cultural, social and political change.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
part I|75 pages
Renaissance Collectors
chapter 2|20 pages
Universal Knowledge and Self-Fashioning
chapter 3|16 pages
‘A Paradise & Cabinet of Rarities’
chapter 4|20 pages
Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn
part II|52 pages
Gentlemen and Their Libraries From the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century
chapter 5|17 pages
‘Ye Best Tast of Books & Learning of Any Other Country Gentn’
part III|57 pages
Beyond Mere Records of Collecting
chapter 8|16 pages
From Francis Bacon’s Historia Literarum to Samuel Johnson’s Literary History
part IV|51 pages
Bibliomania