Where to find that book? Chasing Rare Texts c. 1800-1500. A Symposium.

Bookhunting is generally though of as a typical humanist activity: the term ‘bookhunter’ is used for Renaissance scholars like Poggio Bracciolini and Niccolò de Niccoli. Yet, they were not the first ones to have tried to look for a text they have only known from hearsay. Collecting, finding, hunting rare books is as old a pursuit as libraries themselves.

In a book culture where every book was unique – often with many texts in one volume - even the individual libraries could rarely make a complete catalogue of their text holdings. This made bibliography across libraries an impossible task but also an exciting one.

Lupus Servatus’ ninth-century correspondence testifies to a small but busy network of bibliophiles borrowing, copying, reading, commenting all kind of books from scientific themes like calculus to Cicero’s De oratore.

The twelfth-century Burgundio of Pisa tells us of a quest for a correct Greek copy of John Chrysostom on which to base his Latin translation, a quest in which everyone from the pope in Rome to the archbishop of Antioch was involved.

We seek to cover both the Greek and the Latin worlds of texts as they follow similar trajectories and they become increasingly entangled with a high point in the 15th century. While we want to emphasize medieval text hunting in particular – often less heroic because it is anonymous – it is important to follow the expanding world of books into the 15th century and the age of early print. Once the standardization of print was well established in the 16th century, the practice of bibliography also radically changed – but until then intellectuals lived in a frustrating world of confusion and scarcity, but also one of enthusiastic discoveries.

The present conference looks at this phenomenon in a more systematic way. By discussing a wide array of case studies, we will attempt to answer questions like:
— individual versus collective book-hunt: what institutions were involved, in what way? Royal, papal, imperial courts, bishoprics, monasteries, universities, etc.
— what types of texts were hunted? what constitutes rarity or precious finds in various fields: ancient literature, science, hagiography, theology, law, liturgy, etc.
— How to find forbidden texts?
— techniques of searching and finding.
— reflections of the scholars looking for these items: why do they look for a particular text, what constitutes its value?
— Supplementing deficient texts, finding parts of texts: how to control the origin of new passages?
— these were stricto senso ‘text-hunts’ rather than book-hunts: scholars were looking for a work, rather than a physical object. do we know what happened to those manuscripts that have been found, after they have been found? how does a culture that doesn’t have our concept of cultural heritage treat them?