The Project Gutenberg EBook of Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance
Periods, by J. W. Clark

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Title: Libraries in the Medieval and Renaissance Periods
The Rede Lecture Delivered June 13, 1894

Author: J. W. Clark

Release Date: October 1, 2006 [EBook #19415]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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[Illustration: FIG. 2. General view of part of the Library attached to the
Church of S. Wallberg at Zutphen.

_Frontispiece_]

LIBRARIES

IN THE

MEDIEVAL AND RENAISSANCE PERIODS.

_THE REDE LECTURE,
DELIVERED JUNE 13, 1894_

BY

J.W. CLARK, M.A., F.S.A.
REGISTRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY, AND
FORMERLY FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE.

CAMBRIDGE:
MACMILLAN AND BOWES.
1894

_The lecture was illustrated by lantern-slides. A brief notice
of each of these is printed in the text in Italics at the
place in the lecture where the slide was exhibited._

LIBRARIES.

A library may be considered from two very different points of view: as a
workshop, or as a Museum.

The former commends itself to the practical turn of mind characteristic of
the present day; common sense urges that mechanical ingenuity, which has
done so much in other directions, should be employed in making the
acquisition of knowledge less cumbrous and less tedious; that as we travel
by steam, so we should also read by steam, and be helped in our studies by
the varied resources of modern invention. There lies on my table at this
present moment a _Handbook of Library Appliances_, in which fifty-three
closely printed pages are devoted to this interesting subject, with
illustrations of various contrivances by which the working of a large
library is to be facilitated and brought up to date. In fact, from this
point of view a library may be described as a gigantic mincing-machine,
into which the labours of the past are flung, to be turned out again in a
slightly altered form as the literature of the present.

I