Giles Mandelbrote

I enjoyed this little collection of conference-generated essays. These bibliographic histories seem not at all influenced or perturbed by recent historiographic trends away from positivistic presentation of evidence more or less for its own sake. Peter Beal writes about the "dispersal and rediscovery" of manuscripts in very general terms. David Pearson asks what we can "learn by tracking multiple copies of books" with results that are more suggestive for future work than successful here. The volume starts to come alive with Angelo Nuovo's discussion of the fate of the library created by Renaissance Humanist Gian Vincenzo Pinelli. Astrid C. Balsem traces the whereabouts of books from another major 16th century private collection. Jos van Heel follows the creation and dispersal of a large collection created by the Meerman family. Dondi looks at all the surviving copies of some15th century Italian Book of the Hours. And Pierre Delsaerdt follows important parts of the collection of Gustave van Havre into public collections in Antwerp. All the articles are exhaustively footnoted.… (meer)