L’exploitation quantitative des inventaires médiévaux de livres : un parcours du combattant

Résumé En

Since Theodor Gottlieb’s census inventory of medieval libraries at the end of the 19th century, similar projects have been developed at national level in most European countries. All these companies share the same objective, to list the sources relating to medieval libraries. As part of our doctoral work devoted to the study of private lay libraries and private collections of secular clerics in northern France and northern and central Italy at the end of the Middle Ages, we have built up a corpus of book collections from disparate sources (mentions in wills, inventories after death, inventories of property, among others) thanks to a systematic examination of the specialized directories devoted to Belgium, France and Italy. However, these three companies return a state of the sources and a geographical and social distribution of the owners somewhat biased by the time damage. Indeed, the serial sources, precious and adapted to the application of quantitative methods, lead to generalize particular situations, in this case those of the Tournai bourgeoisie and that of the Florentine patriciate of the 15th century, to entire regions, the Northern and central Italy, and one country, France. It is however not possible to do without these sources, essential for the knowledge of private libraries.