Authors

Stepan Blinder¹;  ¹ University of Cambridge, UK

Discussion

This paper addresses the phenomenon of library cataloguing in the early modern Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from the transmission studies point of view. It analyzes the earliest Western European samples of the library cataloguing practices tracking how they were shaped and who brought them to the Commonwealth in the late 16th century. Relying on the earliest library catalogues from Königsberg, Braniewo/Braunsberg, Gdańsk, Szczecin, Krakow and Poznań, this presentation argues that the libraries of the Commonwealth were transferring cataloguing model from Northern European Protestant kingdoms of the Holy Roman Empire on the one hand and from Catholic Italian kingdoms in the Mediterranean region on the other. Whereas some institutions with libraries, especially Jesuit Colleges, had legal requirements to book management including cataloguing, nearly all universities, Catholic and Protestant collegiums, and monasteries did not have strict rules and thus “invented” their own models of book cataloguing. The paper shows how various cataloguing practices interacted from the spatial and temporal perspective shaping a vivid landscape of library management models across the 16th-century Commonwealth.