IMC 2024: Sessions

These sessions focus on religious communities’ responses to crises in relation to monastic libraries and book collections. We aim to investigate what happened to medieval convent libraries and book collections in times of peril during the Middle Ages, but also the early modern period and up until our time.

Session IV explores how at certain times, these changes were detrimental, and the original context of collections was lost. Papers in this part look at a the Nachleben of medieval and early modern manuscripts, their dispersion and loss in times of peril, their re-assembly and their reinterpretation in their new locations.

Katrin Janz Wenig discusses the Zacharias Konrad of Uffenbach’s manuscript collection at the State Library in Hamburg, and the role of this important collector in saving important manuscripts and fragments from late medieval Rhenish monasteries. Anna Michlalchuck (National School of Charters) analyses how the manuscripts and the archives collected by the Maurists were able to «survive» the «difficult» times of the French revolution. Finally, Suzan Folkers studies the processes of safekeeping and exchange of the book collections from the houses of the Sisters of the common life at Deventer and the monastery of canonesses regular of Diepenveen, during the occupation of these towns by Spanish soldiers and the Dutch Revolt (c. 1560-1600). She will also look at how the sisters' books made it into the town's library.