These papers, fourteen in French, one in Italian, and four in English, arise from scholarly colloquia held in 2011 and 2012 to explore the personal and institutional libraries of the Renaissance. Many of the papers offer useful insights into the origins, use, or eventual fate of libraries of the era, but not all can be highlighted here. Four papers focus on the library of Rabelais and study the use the author made of specific books in his own collection, including an interesting paper in which Claude la Charité pursues work published elsewhere on the medical books with which Rabelais was familiar. Four papers look further into the perennial interest in the books from Montaigne’s personal library. Alain Legros, a recognized authority on Montaigne and his books, contributes a paper on the earliest books Montaigne collected, including those that originated in the collection of his friend Estienne de La Boétie. Marie-Luce Demonet surveys the various digitization projects that involve Montaigne’s writings. She advances an intriguing description of an ideal digital edition of the Essais, which would be machine searchable and which might, for the first time, make it possible to explore and compare the many stages of the book’s revision in a way that cannot be possible in a print edition, however scholarly. Marco Sgattoni looks into the extent to which Montaigne collected books that were on the Indices Librorum Prohibitorum. There are, in fact, several papers in this volume that touch on the issue of prohibited or dangerous books collected by Renaissance readers.

The now-familiar effort to reconstruct the libraries of prominent writers and savants of the past such as Montaigne, Montesquieu, and others, using partial catalogues and references in their writings, is represented in this volume by several papers. François Rouget discusses the library of the poet Philippe Desportes. A strong paper by Denis Bjaï begins work to reconstruct the library of Étienne Pasquier, drawing on evidence from Pasquier’s correspondence. François Rouget contributes a paper on the medical library of surgeon François Rasse des Neux. The libraries of Italian scholars Simone Porzio and Benedetto Varchi have both been dispersed: Eva del Soldato offers a brief account of the fate of each collector’s books. Several papers inquire into the use and circulation of books in Renaissance-era private libraries. Harald Hendrix reveals that the country villas of Italian humanists such as Petrarch, Bembo, and Poggio Braccciolini frequently contained only small book collections, because the function of the villa was to entertain. The scholar’s larger library was probably in his town house. Pierre Delsaerdt contributes a paper on the earliest library at Antwerp that was open to the (educated) public. Editor Gorris Camos closes the volume with a dolorous account of the damages inflicted and manuscripts lost in a 1904 fire at the university library in Turin.

Alexandre Vanautgaerden, director of the Bibliothèque de Genève (which sponsored the publication), contributes a thought-provoking discussion of the nature of a modern research library and its collections. The most famous historic institutions, research universities, and scholarly societies may have acquired their original reputation and prestige from a core collection of rare and important books and manuscripts, which in most cases still are to be found there. But these collections now consist of resources both tangible and online in which that celebrated core collection is drowned amid the miles of shelving required by later acquisitions, and dwarfed by access to millions of online texts. Our mental image of famous collections may be overdue for an update. Scholarly research has been unalterably changed, Vanautgaerden argues, by the connected nature of electronically available information, plunging us into an intellectual landscape in which serendipity has overtaken browsing as a means of discovery.

The book is recommended for scholars of Rabelais or Montaigne, and for historians of the book, especially those with an interest in the Renaissance-era circulation of books on the Index of prohibited books. A generous bibliography and a general index of names and titles cited in the papers enhance the usability of the volume.