The quest for libraries : mission impossible ? (1)

This year's lecture will focus on reconstructing the libraries of Late Antiquity, in an attempt to bring their readers back to life by exploring the link between them and their books. Beyond the literary testimonies often used, we'll be looking at the actual remains of these libraries through an archaeological approach to the question: what is a library? What libraries can we reconstruct from papyrological sources? What can they tell us about the socio-cultural profile of their readers? What was the relationship between Christian and classical books in these collections between the ^4th and ^7th centuries?

The quest for libraries: mission impossible? (1)

Before we can provide answers to these questions, we must try to understand why the task of reconstituting these libraries is so difficult, and why it has not been the subject of systematic study until now.

Provenance: an often missing or dubious piece of information.

The first difficulty is that a large proportion of literary papyri did not emerge from archaeological excavations and entered the collections without any data on their provenance. Unlike documents, books contain no information that can be used to put them into context (no provenance, no date, no name of the copyist or patron). It was not yet customary to accompany books with colophons or to affix bookplates.