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Sunderland, Luke (2016) 'Introduction : medieval libraries, history of the book and literature.', French
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Unpublished draft – do not cite or circulate – refer to published version ‘Introduction: 

Medieval Libraries, History of the Book and Literature’, French Studies, 70.2 (2016), 1–

12 
 

INTRODUCTION: MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES, HISTORY OF THE BOOK, AND 

LITERATURE 

 

Medieval libraries are studied as collections of books, but much less frequently as collections 

of ideas. They are somewhat neglected by literary scholars, who tend to define the parameters 

of their studies in terms of authors, genres, themes, traditions, or movements, rather than 

library collections. Such critics are interested in where individual texts come from or where 

they go, and much less in which texts were gathered together in libraries and thus made sense 

together. Studies have increased awareness of the intertextuality of medieval literature,
1
 

especially of the interplay between literature and philosophy in the later Middle Ages; 

                                                 

The pieces in this special issue were developed at a series of workshops sponsored by 

Durham University and the University of Cambridge, 2012–13. We would like to thank both 

institutions for their support. Philippe Frieden, Thomas Hinton, and Luke Sunderland are 

grateful to Durham’s Institute of Medieval & Early Modern Studies for sponsorship of a 

project panel at the International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, 2014. Finally, 

Sunderland would like to thank the University of Minnesota for the invitation to speak in 

2014, which helped form the ideas expressed in this Introduction. 

 

1
 See especially Adrian Armstrong and Sarah Kay, Knowing Poetry: Verse in Medieval 

France from the ‘Rose’ to the ‘Rhétoriqueurs’ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Alain 

Corbellari, La Voix des clercs: littérature et savoir universitaire autour des dits du XIII
e 
siècle 

(Geneva: Droz, 2005). 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  2 

 

medieval literary texts were of course in dialogue with other sorts of knowledge. But the 

potential for using popular literary texts — the incontournables of medieval libraries — to 

inform an idea of what those libraries symbolized, or how they were conceived or used, 

remains unexploited. Nor has the medieval library been deployed to make sense of the texts 

found within it, despite the fact that the meaning of any text is inevitably informed by 

familiarity with the other works alongside which it is found. Rather, History of the Book has 

been the main field to tackle medieval libraries. Scholars in that domain show well how 

people needed, made, or used books. Patronage, ownership, lending, and production are 

central foci as the histories of particular manuscripts and the activities of makers and 

collectors are documented. Meaning is found in the physical forms of writing, or in the 

structure and presentation of manuscripts, including paratextual features, such as rubrics and 

marginalia.
2
 But History of the Book’s statistics-driven approach, reliant on empirical data, 

remains epistemologically cautious and runs up against natural limits where such information 

is sketchy or unavailable. History of the Book is interested in the supply and demand of 

books as objects; it has concentrated on tracking and measuring book ownership.
3
 But it lacks 

the ‘human contexts for the production and reception of texts’.
4
  

                                                 
2
 These are the subjects dominating the recent compilation of the work of two of the most 

important scholars in History of the Book: Richard H. and Mary A. Rouse, Bound Fast with 

Letters: Medieval Writers, Readers, and Texts (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 

2013). For an overview of the field, see Alexandra Gillespie, ‘Analytical Survey 9: The 

History of the Book’, New Medieval Literatures, 9 (2007), 245–86. 

3
 See the critique of History of the Book offered in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, 

‘Introduction’, in A History of Reading in the West, ed. by Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger 

Chartier, trans. by Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), pp. 1–36; Roger Chartier, 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  3 

 

Expanded to the level of the library, the positivist approach of History of the Book 

shows its limitations more clearly. The library is reduced to being a symptom of the processes 

of production; thus Jenny Stratford and Teresa Webber note the tendency to focus on 

individual books and owners, due to lack of evidence about how books were ‘perceived, 

acquired, or used as collections’.
5
 Though sociological questions, such as taste and 

temperament, can be answered via knowledge of the economics of the book trade, this tends 

again to tabulated data. Codices become mere figures in defined lists of knowable facts, and 

the library is viewed as the aggregation of these facts, a bigger data set. Hanno Wijsman’s 

recent work on the libraries of Burgundian nobles, for example, carefully records the 

ownership of texts in particular languages and genres. He shows how the ducal library, in the 

later Middle Ages, was ‘geared to secular use and the representation of worldly power […] 

The book in the noble library now becomes chiefly a source of secular knowledge and 

identity and is no longer predominantly in the service of the culture of prayer’.
6
 This is 

precisely the kind of reductive claim about texts — which are made monochromatic — that 

dominates the field. The nature and dynamics of this ‘secular knowledge’ remain 

unexamined. Elsewhere, the same answers are peddled: aristocratic libraries contained 

standard corpora; they reflected the noble world-view; they manifested wealth and status; 

                                                                                                                                                        

L’Ordre des livres: lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothèques en Europe entre XIV
e
 et XVIII

e 
siècle (Aix-

en-Provence: Alinea, 1992). 

4
 Gillespie, ‘History of the Book’, p. 249. 

5
 ‘Bishops and Kings: Private Book Collections in Medieval England’, in The Cambridge 

History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland I: to 1640, ed. by Elisabeth Leedham-Green and 

Teresa Webber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 178–217 (p. 183). 

6
 Luxury Bound: Illustrated Manuscript Production and Noble and Princely Book Ownership 

in the Burgundian Netherlands (1440–1550) (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), p. 153. 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  4 

 

they served political, dynastic, or crusading aims.
7
 Scholars in History of the Book quite 

rightly criticize the tendency of scholars in other fields to disembody medieval texts — that 

is, to treat them outside of the context of the books they circulated in
8
 — but History of the 

Book in turn focuses on the embodiment of the texts to the detriment of the texts themselves. 

It flattens texts for which multiple readings and resonances are possible, and sidelines the 

capacity of works to create and disrupt their own systems of meaning.
9
 Medieval libraries 

have thus become part of social and economic history, without being properly integrated into 

the history of ideas. History of the Book fails to show how individual works fitted within a 

wider body of knowledge, and why books and libraries mattered to medieval readers 

intellectually. This special issue aims to take steps towards rectifying that. In the rest of this 

Introduction, I will argue that an approach informed by Foucault can help illuminate the 

phenomenon of the medieval library. 

 

Foucault and libraries 

In Les Mots et les choses, Foucault repeatedly turns to the library as a figure of knowledge 

organized, completed, mastered, totalized. Describing Renaissance knowledge in terms of 

                                                 
7
 See, on the Burgundian collection, The Ideology of Burgundy, ed. by D’Arcy Jonathan 

Dacre Boulton and Jan Veenstra (Leiden: Brill, 2006). Deborah McGrady sees book 

acquisition as aggressive assertion of power: ‘What is a Patron? Benefactors and Authorship 

in MS Harley 4431, Christine de Pizan’s Collected Works’, in Christine de Pizan and the 

Categories of Difference, ed. by Marilynn Desmond (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota 

Press, 1998), pp. 195–214. 

8
 Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose, ‘Introduction’, in A Companion to the History of the Book, 

ed. by Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (Malden: Blackwell, 2007), pp. 1–6. 

9
 Gillespie, ‘History of the Book’, p. 256. 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  5 

 

resemblance, Foucault suggests it forms a second-degree treasure trove, a classification 

system, a set of marks, referring to the treasure of nature: ‘la vérité de toutes ces marques — 

qu’elles traversent la nature, ou qu’elles s’alignent sur les parchemins et dans les 

bibliothèques — est partout la même: aussi archaïque que l’institution de Dieu’.
10

 He also 

writes that La Croix du Maine ‘imagine un espace à la fois d’Encyclopédie et de Bibliothèque 

qui permettrait de disposer les textes écrits selon les figures du voisinage, de la parenté, de 

l’analogie et de la subordination que prescrit le monde lui-même’.
11

 The library is, then, a 

collection of texts which together provide a complete and systematic representation of the 

world. Foucault writes at more length about libraries in two lesser-known pieces: ‘Des 

espaces autres’ and La Bibliothèque fantastique.
12

 In the former, Foucault develops his idea 

of ‘heterotopias’, which are defined first of all in contradistinction to utopias. Utopias are:  

les emplacements qui entretiennent avec 1’espace réel de la société un rapport général 

d’analogie directe ou inversée. C’est la société elle-même perfectionnée ou c’est 

l’envers de la société, mais, de toute façon, ces utopies sont des espaces qui sont 

fondamentalement essentiellement irréels.
13

 

Heterotopias, on the other hand, are simultaneously real and mythical: 

des lieux réels, des lieux effectifs, des lieux qui sont dessinés dans l’institution même 

de la société, et qui sont des sortes de contre-emplacements, sortes d’utopies 

                                                 
10

 Les Mots et les choses: une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966), p. 

49. 

11
 Les Mots et les choses, p. 53. 

12
 ‘Des espaces autres’, in Dits et écrits IV (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), pp. 752–62; La 

Bibliothèque fantastique: à propos de la ‘Tentation de saint Antoine’ de Gustave Flaubert 

(Bruxelles: La Lettre volée, 1995). 

13
 ‘Des espaces autres’, p. 755. 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  6 

 

effectivement réalisées dans lesquelles les emplacements réels, tous les autres 

emplacements réels que l’on peut trouver à l'intérieur de la culture sont à la fois 

représentés, contestés et inversés, des sortes de lieux qui sont hors de tous les lieux, 

bien que pourtant ils soient effectivement localisables.
14

 

Foucault ventures six arguments about heterotopias. First, all cultures create heterotopias: 

primitive societies have what he terms crisis heterotopias (privileged, sacred, or forbidden 

places, reserved for individuals in a state of crisis: menstruating or pregnant women, the 

elderly). Such heterotopias are disappearing today, replaced by a second category: 

heterotopias of deviation (psychiatric hospitals and prisons). Second, particular heterotopias 

can change function over time. Third, ‘l’hétérotopie a le pouvoir de juxtaposer en un seul lieu 

réel plusieurs espaces, plusieurs emplacements qui sont en eux-mêmes incompatibles’
15

 — 

the best example is the theatre, which brings onto the stage, successively, a series of places 

foreign to one another. The cinema works in a similar way, and the garden is the oldest 

example of this sort of heterotopia: ‘le jardin, c’est la plus petite parcelle du monde et puis 

c’est la totalité du monde. Le jardin, c’est, depuis le fond de l'Antiquité, une sorte 

d’hétérotopie heureuse et universalisante (de là nos jardins zoologiques)’.
16

 Fourth, temporal 

discontinuities are also often absorbed, making ‘heterochronias’ such as museums and 

libraries: ‘il y a […] les hétérotopies du temps qui s’accumule à l’infini, par exemple les 

musées, les bibliothèques’.
17

 Fifth, heterotopias are not freely accessible: either one is locked 

in, such as in prison, or entry requires ritual or purification. And sixth, finally, heterotopias 

                                                 
14

 ‘Des espaces autres’, pp. 755–56. 

15
 ‘Des espaces autres’, p. 758. 

16
 ‘Des espaces autres’, p. 759. 

17
 ‘Des espaces autres’, p. 759. 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  7 

 

can be communities relying on the exclusion of the outside world, which is denounced as 

illusory or imperfect; this type is like a realized utopia, such as the Jesuit colony. 

Worlds in miniature which stand in a variety of problematic, shifting relationships 

with the real world, heterotopias destabilize any opposition between order and disorder. They 

contain disorder within an ordered structure, or else hold multiple, competing orders within 

one space. And the library is for Foucault a heterotopia peculiar to modernity:  

au XVII
e
, jusqu’à la fin du XVII

e
 siècle encore, les musées et les bibliothèques étaient 

l’expression d'un choix individuel. En revanche, l’idée de tout accumuler, l’idée de 

constituer une sorte d’archive générale, la volonté d’enfermer dans un lieu tous les 

temps, toutes les époques, toutes les formes, tous les goûts, l’idée de constituer un lieu 

de tous les temps qui soit lui-même hors du temps, et inaccessible à sa morsure, le 

projet d’organiser ainsi une sorte d’accumulation perpétuelle et indéfinie du temps 

dans un lieu qui ne bougerait pas, eh bien, tout cela appartient à notre modernité. Le 

musée et la bibliothèque sont des hétérotopies qui sont propres à la culture occidentale 

du XIX
e
 siècle.

18
 

The library is organized in a way that compensates for the disorder of the real world; it is a 

place where the discourses of the world — spatially and temporally different — find their 

place, within one big system. But this vision of the library, as an embodiment of the 

nineteenth-century desire to know, catalogue, and master, stands in contrast to the one 

developed in La Bibliothèque fantastique, Foucault’s reading of Flaubert’s Tentation de 

Saint-Antoine. Antoine, living as a hermit in a hut high up on a cliff overlooking the Nile and 

the desert, is overcome by despair and solitude. He prepares to leave his hermitage, but hates 

himself for weakness, and throws himself down to the ground where he falls into a trance. As 

he lies immobile, he is tempted by the devil who deploys a wide variety of illusions. The 

                                                 
18

 ‘Des espaces autres’, p. 759. 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  8 

 

universe parades before Antoine: he sees manifestations of desire, knowledge, power, 

imagination. Visions of plenty (food, drink, wealth, adulation) are followed by the 

appearance of his disciple Hilarion, who represents science and reason, and critiques 

Antoine’s doctrinal knowledge. Various heretics appear, as do other gods and beings, such as 

dwarfs, the Sphinx and the Chimera. For Foucault, La Tentation is a library; he speaks of its 

erudition and mentions some of the many books Flaubert consulted on doctrine, heresy, and 

mythology. Scholars have lamented this aspect, claiming the work drowns under the weight 

of its knowledge.
19

 But Foucault sees it as a comprehensive tour of knowledge types: ‘comme 

un soleil nocturne, La Tentation va d’est en ouest, du désir au savoir, de l’imagination à la 

vérité, des plus vieilles nostalgies aux déterminations de la science moderne’.
20

 However La 

Tentation is not a library as we know it. The idea of the library as a heterotopia takes on new 

dimensions in this text: it is entered as a dream, an illusion; it is a sacred, forbidden space of 

crisis. This library is a fantastic reconciliation of the rational with the irrational, and the 

dreamlike with the scholarly. In the text, we see the library ‘ouverte, inventoriée, découpée, 

répétée et combinée dans un espace nouveau’.
21

 Play and imagination are untrammelled by 

the barriers of order. Foucault contrasts La Tentation to Don Quixote and the Marquis de 

Sade’s Nouvelle Justine: both are books created by absorbing and reacting to other books. 

                                                 
19

 Such critiques are summarized by Allan H. Pasco, ‘Trinitarian Unity in La Tentation de 

Saint-Antoine’, French Studies, 56 (2002), 457–70, who also notes critical attempts to find 

order. Mary Orr reads the text as a set of dialogues between sacred and secular knowledge: 

Flaubert’s ‘Tentation’: Remapping Nineteenth-Century French Histories of Religion and 

Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 

20
 La Bibliothèque fantastique, p. 23. 

21
 La Bibliothèque fantastique, p. 26. 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  9 

 

But they ironize the books they devour, whereas Flaubert’s text holds out quite different 

possibilities: 

La Tentation, elle, se rapporte sur le mode sérieux à l’immense domaine de 

l’imprimé; elle prend place dans l’institution reconnue de l’écriture. C’est moins un 

livre nouveau, qu’une œuvre qui s’étend sur l’espace des livres existants. Elle les 

recouvre, les cache, les manifeste, d’un seul mouvement les fait étinceler et 

disparaître. Elle n’est pas seulement un livre que Flaubert, longtemps, a rêvé d’écrire; 

elle est le rêve des autres livres: tous les autres livres, rêvants, rêvés, — repris, 

fragmentés, déplacés, combinés, mis à distance par le songe, mais par lui aussi 

rapprochés jusqu’à la satisfaction imaginaire et scintillante du désir. Après, Le Livre 

de Mallarmé deviendra possible, puis Joyce, Roussel, Kafka, Pound, Borges. La 

bibliothèque est en feu.
22

 

Foucault describes a delirium of literary research here. There is madness within order, and 

order within madness. He also reconnects here with the garden imagery of ‘Des espaces 

autres’: 

La Tentation est la première œuvre littéraire qui tienne compte de ces institutions 

verdâtres où les livres s’accumulent et où croît doucement la lente, la certaine 

végétation de leur savoir. Flaubert est à la bibliothèque ce que Manet est au musée.
23

 

Flaubert captures the library in its essence as a vast space of possibility that no longer just 

contains knowledge but also facilitates its creation. He unleashes the literary potential of the 

library. Indeed library scientist Gary Radford sees in the piece possibilities for ‘an alternative 

perspective from which the rationalistic assumptions of a positivistic epistemology can be 

foregrounded, transcended, and critiqued, along with the conception of the academic library 

                                                 
22

 La Bibliothèque fantastique, p. 10. 

23
 La Bibliothèque fantastique, p. 11. 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  10 

 

which it supports’.
24

 For Radford, traditional concepts of knowledge, meaning, and 

communication in library and information science face a crisis because they fail to 

understand how people experience their interactions with the modern academic library. 

Refusing the idea of absolute knowledge, Radford suggests that the library be seen as a route 

to particular knowledges, each created as a user moves through the collection. Users need the 

freedom to find different itineraries, forming individual rationalities that will never add up to 

a single, stable order of knowledge. Radford’s piece dates to 1998, but his conclusions apply 

a fortiori to the era of digital scholarship, Google and Wikipedia, when readers need to ask 

questions about authority, citation and the nature of truth — rather than being able simply to 

depend on the fact that the provided content is reliable — but are also allowed to become 

contributors in their own right. Mary Franklin-Brown begins and ends her study of medieval 

encyclopaedias with comparisons to Wikipedia: both have labyrinthine qualities, 

polyvocality, and most importantly, a tension between the aspiration to universality and order 

on the one hand, and unstable practices of citation, cross-referencing, and openness to 

revision on the other.
25

 Both medieval encyclopaedias and Wikipedia arguably replace and 

supplement libraries, but also provide a model for understanding them. Indeed the disruptive 

dimensions of both correspond well to Foucault’s imagining in La Bibliothèque fantastique of 

the library as a multifarious, unsettling cavalcade of irreconcilable ideas, rather than as 

storehouse of a tamed and fixed savoir; thus in turn invites critique of his historicization in 

‘Des espaces autres’, by conjuring away the shift from the medieval and early modern library 

                                                 
24

 ‘Flaubert, Foucault, and the Bibliotheque Fantastique: Toward a Postmodern Epistemology 

for Library Science’, Library Trends, 46 (1998), 616–34 (p. 616). 

25
 Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age (Chicago: University of 

Chicago Press, 2012), pp. 1–12; 305–10. 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  11 

 

as personal collection to the modern library as a culture’s ordered archive. The nineteenth 

century, along with other periods, had wildly different conceptions of the library. 

The Middle Ages in fact show symptoms of many of the phenomena Foucault 

attributes to the nineteenth century. First, the term ‘library’ must be used carefully: Foucault 

deploys it as much to designate an imaginary space of encounter between books as an 

institutional space where they are stored. For the medieval period, it is the former sense, 

closer to the idea of book collection, that is arguably more important: ordered, institutional 

libraries were still nascent, with many sets of books housed in chests or cabinets rather than 

rooms with shelves. Yet works were circulating with greater intensity and coming into 

contact, because the proliferation of books is not unique to the era of print, as Michael 

Clanchy cautions: ‘a vigorous book-using culture was the precursor to the invention of 

printing rather than its consequence’.
26

 Christopher de Hamel even speaks of ‘a sudden 

excess of knowledge’ from the twelfth century onwards, which accelerated book production; 

there was ‘an almost relentless stream of new titles in the lists of desiderata, in theology, 

history, politics, geography, natural history (bestiaries, for example), liturgy (missals rather 

than the older sacramentaries), and the first ancient Greek works translated into Latin from 

Arabic intermediaries’.
27

 The secular book trade was growing apace;
28

 and the prologues to 

works of the period often speak of the number and diversity of books. There was evidently a 

bewildering increase in the amount of written material. It is common for authors to start an 

                                                 
26

 ‘Parchment and Paper: Manuscript Culture 1100–1500’, in A Companion to the History of 

the Book, ed. by Eliot and Rose, pp. 194–206 (p. 195). 

27
 ‘The European Medieval Book’, in The Book: A Global History, ed. by Michael F. Suarez, 

S.J. and H.R. Woudhuysen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 59–79 (p. 64). 

28
 Richard and Mary Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers: Commercial Book Production in 

Medieval Paris 1200–1500, 2 vols (Turnhout: Brepols, 2000). 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  12 

 

encyclopaedia or compilation by saying that it has been written because there are many 

books, such as here when Bartholomaeus Anglicus explains his reasons for producing his 

encyclopaedia: 

Ut simplices et parvuli, qui propter librorum infinitatem singularum rerum 

proprietates, de quibus tractat scriptura, investigare non possunt, in promptu invenire 

valeant saltem superficialiter quod intendunt. 

 

[so that uneducated people and children, who cannot investigate the properties of 

individual things that Scripture discusses, because of the infinity of books, can easily 

find want they want, albeit on a superficial level.]
29

 

This of course also raises questions about accessibility and changing audiences. New 

vernacular reading publics were hungry for translations; the book trade grew rapidly in 

response. Bartholomaeus’s encyclopaedia would itself become vastly popular in its French 

rendering as well as its Latin original. The desire for rationality, order, and truth was also 

manifest in the way in which books were becoming easier to consult thanks to rubrics, tables 

of contents, indexes, notae, and running heads. It was a world of more and longer books: the 

drive to complete and compile explains the vogue, from the thirteenth century onwards, for 

anthologies, florilegia, miscellanea, codifications, summae, and mammoth literary texts such 

as Arthurian prose cycles. Frédéric Duval sketches an ideal late medieval Francophone 

library by cataloguing all those texts with more than fifty surviving manuscripts dating to the 

period 1350 to 1500.
30

 Amongst other works, he notes the presence of Bibles historiales; 

                                                 
29

 De Proprietatibus Rerum: Volume I (Prohemium, Libri I–IV), ed. by Baudouin van den 

Abeele and others (Turnhout: Brepols, 2007), p. 6. My translation. 

30
 Lectures françaises de la fin du Moyen Âge: petite anthologie commentée de succès 

littéraires (Geneva: Droz, 2007). 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  13 

 

prayerbooks and moral guides; Frère Laurent’s La Somme le roi; the Roman de la Rose; 

manuals of hunting and falconry; medical works; encylopaedias (Sidrac, Gossouin de Metz’s 

Image du monde and Brunetto Latini’s Trésor); great histories (the Histoire ancienne jusqu’à 

César, the Grandes chroniques de France); and works by Boethius, Guillaume de 

Digulleville, Jean Gerson, and Christine de Pizan. Many of these are attempts to summarize 

and compile certain forms of knowledge (historical, medical, moral, philosophical, or 

practical), or to dramatize human encounters with the limits of the knowable. Three 

contributors to this special issue have worked on literary cycles, seeking models of 

completeness and narrative order, as well as moments when disorder imposes itself.
 31

 Such 

thinking informs our approach to libraries. Cycles, anthologies, and the like are microcosms 

of libraries, modes of gathering, organizing and making sense of diverse material; they are 

products of a search for classifiable, totalizable, and manageable knowledge. Yet they also 

betray the fear that knowledge might spiral out of control, or that particular pieces of 

knowledge might prove impossible to locate. Foucault’s heterotopia corresponds to the 

multiple systems for ordering the things of the world — competing discourses and disciplines 

are represented and related, without ever tessellating completely — that are found in 

medieval libraries. Yet, in a dimension missing from Foucault’s idea of the library, the 

medieval book collection was also heterotopic because it gathered codices each with a highly 

individualized history of production, ownership, and use, bound up with practices of gift-

giving and inheritance (here, there is great potential for the reconnection of History of the 

                                                 
31

 Miranda Griffin, The Object and the Cause in the Vulgate Cycle (Oxford: Legenda, 2005); 

Thomas Hinton, The ‘Conte du Graal’ Cycle: Chrétien de Troyes’s ‘Perceval’, the 

Continuations, and French Arthurian Romance (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012); Luke 

Sunderland, Old French Narrative Cycles: Heroism between Ethics and Morality 

(Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010). 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  14 

 

Book’s thinking with literary and philosophical work). Foucault thinks teleologically — he 

seems to picture the library as an institution, a fixed place where ever more texts accrete — 

but medieval libraries were frequently temporary projects, prone to dispersal. Collections 

often broke up after the death of their owners; books were stolen, sold or destroyed; 

parchment was reused. Viewed synchronically at any one moment, a medieval library held 

varieties of books, texts, and discourses in an imperfect crystallization of knowledge new and 

old. But considered diachronically, the medieval library appears personal, transitory, and 

palimpsestic. The relationship between writer, rewriter, reader, and text varied from 

manuscript to manuscript. An individual vision of order could always be replaced by a new 

one when books or collections changed hands; particular elements within the knowledge set 

retained their distinctiveness, and along with it their potential to combine differently, with 

other works and other systems, in new locations. 

Many medieval codices gather diverse texts and books within them and could be 

considered libraries in miniature. In this sense, it is perhaps the encyclopaedia that best 

represents the library — indeed, Foucault uses the ideas of the library and of the 

encyclopaedia interchangeably as figures of knowledge mastered and completed in Les Mots 

et les choses — and my dialogue with Foucault in this context is inspired by Franklin-

Brown’s work on the scholastic encyclopaedia, already referenced. Franklin-Brown reveals 

how encyclopaedias reproduce other texts and other discourses, juxtaposing historically and 

generically different ways of knowing, through the scholarly practices of commentary and 

compilation. Attacking Foucault’s historical argument, she casts Vincent of Beauvais’s 

Speculum maius as a medieval heterotopia: 

the desire to create such a space is not uniquely modern, a fact to which the Speculum 

maius bears most eloquent, overwhelming testimony. Like the modern library, the 

scholastic encyclopedia compensated for the confusion of volumes piled into the 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  15 

 

armarium or book cabinet, for the heteroglot murmur of discourses circulating 

through the walls of the monastery, the school, the university, and the castle, by 

gathering them all into a single space, the book, and fixing them on the page, in some 

comprehensible order that, itself, lent order and meaning to the world it represented. 

The constitution of a utopia of knowledge, the realization of that utopia in an actual 

place: it would be difficult to find a better summation of what drove the scholastic 

encyclopedists to pick up their quills.
32

 

Foucault’s description of La Tentation de saint Antoine, however, has other potential links. It 

could well be applied to the Roman de la Rose, another product of the opening up of 

intertextual possibility as a set of books is consumed to create another. The presence of books 

together in libraries allows for the composition — compilation, anthologization — of other 

works.
33

 But more fundamentally, the existence of private libraries and the increase in private 

book ownership also meant that there was a newly-formed reading public with heterogeneous 

tastes that could understand and desire such books. Sylvia Huot reads the Rose as a tissue of 

citations, as ‘an extensive and intricate tour of Latin authors, both ancient and medieval’.
34

 

Because the text contains citations of ancient authors but does not mark them as such, she 

argues that it ‘presupposes, rather than provides, knowledge of these texts’.
35

 The medieval 

                                                 
32

 Reading the World, p. 217. 

33
 Sarah Kay casts Christine de Pizan’s Livre du Chemin de longue estude as ‘a creative 

rereading of Christine’s own library’: The Place of Thought: The Complexity of One in Late 

Medieval French Didactic Poetry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), p. 

158. 

34
 Dreams of Lovers and Lies of Poets (London: Legenda, 2010), p. 100. Armstrong and Kay 

call the Rose ‘a disorderly double of an encyclopedia’ (Knowing Poetry, p. 85). 

35
 Dreams, p. 100. 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  16 

 

library is a creative space of possibility: the existence of libraries drove the production and 

consumption of heterotopic books. Many late medieval works are both books and interfaces 

between traditions. They show the desire to cross the boundaries of knowledge, but also the 

fear of disorder, the anxiety that knowledge might remain hopelessly elusive, polyvocal, or 

contradictory. 

Returning to Foucault, we might see such works, and the libraries that contain them, 

as examples of the limited or composite forms of universality that substitute for the 

impossible, perfect encyclopaedia. In Les Mots et les choses, Foucault speaks of the 

eighteenth-century scholar Charles Bonnet, who imagined a huge library of the universe or 

the true universal encyclopaedia, and saw all actual libraries and encyclopaedias as 

necessarily pale imitations: ‘sur ce fond d’une Encyclopédie absolue, les humains constituent 

des formes intermédiaires d’universalité composée et limitée’.
36

 Library collections contained 

some texts offering mastery of worldly knowledge in face of discordant discourses, and 

others revealing the impossibility of a complete grasp on what can be known. If we remain 

transfixed by the stories of where individual texts or physical books originated or what their 

dissemination was — and those are the foci of both History of the Book and much literary 

scholarship — then we lose sight of which texts were gathered together in libraries and thus 

made sense together, as different ways of coping with the imperfections and complications of 

human knowledge. Each medieval library must be grasped as a project — fleeting, 

heterogeneous, and incomplete — that reaches out in its own more or less systematic way 

towards the limits of the knowable. 

                                                 
36

 Les Mots et les choses, p. 100 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  17 

 

The heterotopic medieval library 

Through their analysis of particular texts and collections, the pieces offered here open up 

ways of examining the medieval idea of the library which both concord with and contest 

Foucault’s analysis. Libraries are sets of knowledge in various states of completion, partially 

realized utopias, special spaces to which access is reserved, personal projects, systems 

juxtaposing incompatible discourses and historically-layered modes of knowing; they at once 

represent, contest, and invert the values of the culture around them. The pieces of this special 

issue move chronologically, from the twelfth century, which saw an acceleration of 

manuscript production, through the late Middle Ages, where texts entered into increasingly 

intense interdisciplinary dialogue, to the early modern period, when a vibrant manuscript 

culture survived alongside print. First, Thomas Hinton looks at the metaphors of the garden 

(also dear to Foucault) and the forest as alternative models for knowledge and as responses to 

the diversity of books, suggesting an oscillation between order and chaos: book collecting 

parallels cultivation and both are opposed to the wild forest, as Hinton demonstrates through 

readings of Reginald of Durham and Richard de Fournival. But the field of History of the 

Book has focused too greatly on monasteries and universities, argues Hinton, and there 

remains an urgent need to move towards private libraries, where cultural historians can help 

form a new approach. Hinton attempts to sketch one here by adopting a margins and centre 

methodology. Outside the centre of institutional libraries, the city, as site of the production of 

books for private ownership, especially in the vernacular, appears as particularly active. The 

forest is of course another margin: associated with unsorted knowledge and language in 

Dante and du Bellay, it also provides a metaphor in medieval romances by Wace, Chaucer 

and Benoît de Saint-Maure for the marvel, the surprise encounter and the unexpected power 

of books. The idea that reading could potentially lead in unexpected directions is a recurrent 

concern of vernacular authors, suggesting that the forest could ultimately prove more 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  18 

 

productive than the kempt garden. This is far from the imposed order of the modern library, 

and close to Foucault’s vision of Flaubert’s Tentation.  

Like Foucault, Emma Campbell uses literary texts to formulate an idea of the library. 

References to real or imaginary sources in medieval vernacular literature are relatively 

conventional, but some writers locate their sources more precisely, mentioning a work in a 

library or book collection. Drawing on Benoît de Saint-Maure’s Roman de Troie, Thomas of 

Kent’s Roman de toute chevalerie, Adgar’s Le Gracial, and Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligès, 

Campbell explores how such references to libraries frame the composition of French texts, 

and considers the particularities of these references. Medieval book collections significantly 

predate the conceptions of rational totalization which inform many modern notions of the 

library, including Foucault’s thinking in Les Mots et les choses; the ordering of knowledge 

with which they are associated consequently looks substantially different from that of the 

present day. Campbell argues that the library as it appears in medieval French literature is 

connected to hierarchies of knowledge rather than to systems of classification or notions of 

ordered space; she therefore moves away from the thematics of order and disorder to 

envisage the library as a set of relationships between writers, readers, and texts. Indeed 

Campbell’s final example, Adenet le Roi’s Berte as grans pies, locates its source to the 

library of Saint-Denis, a site for intellectual activity with royal and monastic associations, and 

a contact point between different historical periods. This allows Campbell to argue that the 

medieval library connotes textual and epistemological genealogies, offering a site for the 

transmission of knowledge through books, and a geographical and historical link in the 

movements of translatio between disparate cultures and peoples. 

 Miranda Griffin also picks up on the heterochronic dimension of the library, by 

casting the Ovide moralisé as a microcosm of the book collection. Like the Rose, the Ovide 

moralisé is an interface with classical traditions, a book that helped readers deal with the 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  19 

 

diversity of discourses by suggesting a model for their integration, whilst also playing on 

their discordance. In a similar way to La Tentation, the Ovide moralisé creatively rewrites 

other books, offering the medieval reader both a translation of Ovid’s tales of transformation 

from Latin to French, and a digest moralizing them to bring out their value in transmitting 

divine truths. It forges links between diverse sets of material by absorbing and rewriting other 

books in a reading practice involving commentary and translation, all the while overtly 

conscious of its dependence on, and re-evaluation of, previous instances of authority. Griffin 

focuses on the encounter between two auctores cited in the Ovide moralisé: Ovid and an 

author referred to as ‘Crestien’. Evidence from Ovide moralisé codices belonging to the 

libraries of King Philippe VI, his wife, Jeanne de Bourgogne and their three grandsons —

King Charles V; Jean, duc de Berry; and Philippe le Hardi, duc de Bourgogne — suggests 

that the name Crestien, today likely to be identified with Chrétien de Troyes, would in the 

fourteenth century likely have connoted the author responsible for a twelfth-century 

translation and adaptation of the Philomela section of Book VI of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an 

œuvre which is itself interpolated into the Ovide moralisé. The author function of ‘Ovide’ is 

for Griffin multifaceted and multiform, and the Ovide moralisé both a book resulting from an 

imaginative approach to a library, and a library itself. The medieval library can, in turn, be 

viewed as a fantastic encounter with a book collection, as a space where texts refigure, 

reshape, re-evaluate, and toy with one another. 

This focus on book users continues in Philippe Frieden’s examination of the book 

collection of Charles d’Orléans, which demonstrates how particular libraries can be seen as 

sets of alternative histories, varying with the manufacture, provenance, and ownership of 

each volume. In Foucault’s terms, the collection is a particular, limited universality, an 

individual, idiosyncratic, or personalized form of completeness. It is heterotopic in marking 

exclusivity and socio-political distinction, with books as valuable objects and markers of 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  20 

 

status, and heterochronic because manuscripts passed through different hands, taking on 

layers of meaning from the collections around them, and also from being annotated 

palimpsestically. All the same, mastery of knowledge is also expressed. More specifically, 

the figure of the duke as owner or collector appears in a variety of forms within the 

collection, and the library can be considered as the reflection of the collector himself, and the 

embodiment of a series of events and relationships in his life. It offers an unusually rich 

opportunity to gain a better understanding of the intimate links connecting manuscripts, 

medieval libraries, and their owners and family. Through study of the surviving catalogues of 

the collection, details held within books made for him, and his own book of poetry, Frieden 

sheds light on the portrait of Charles d’Orléans as a collector that is provided by these various 

pieces of evidence. 

John O’Brien’s ‘Response’ closes the collection with consideration of the early 

modern period, arguing that what changes in the library is not so much the knowledge-

conception of the space as the sort of works that are allowed access to that space — which 

remains a heterotopia with selective access — and the place they have in it. O’Brien 

distinguishes courtly libraries, where medieval romances and epics remained popular, and 

libraries like the Royal Library which might include them alongside the New Learning, from 

scholars’ libraries which normally would not contain that vernacular medieval literature, but 

might easily have theological or philosophical or historical works drawing on the medieval 

heritage. O’Brien shows that the early modern library is not the same entity at every temporal 

or spatial point in the period, and its relationship to the past, especially the medieval era, is 

diverse, rich, and many-sided. 

If History of the Book believes that the medieval library is knowable by its codices, 

then we want to reveal what medievalists might better understand by close reading of its 

texts, and especially literary texts, because of their capacity to dramatize human encounters 



MEDIEVAL LIBRARIES  21 

 

with books, in their perplexing variety, to bring divergent discourses into contact, and to 

reveal the interplay between order and chaos that shaped libraries. It is literary texts that best 

show the workings of libraries as heterotopias, holding together texts that vary synchronically 

(by vehicling different modes of knowing, ordering, and writing) and diachronically (by 

encapsulating different histories of ownership, composition, rewriting, and transmission). 

This special issue will give a glimpse of the potential for literary texts to provide insight into 

the cultural work performed by medieval libraries.