• DOI:10.1111/j.0963-9462.2004.00141.x
• Corpus ID: 247668930

Charlemagne's court library revisited

@article{Ganz2003CharlemagnesCL,
  title={Charlemagne's court library revisited},
  author={David Ganz},
  journal={Early Medieval Europe},
  year={2003},
  volume={12}
}

• D. Ganz
• Published 1 December 2003
• History
• Early Medieval Europe

The starting point of all modern discussion of Charlemagne’s court library is, as of so much else, a lapidary statement in Einhard’s Vita Karoli . The penultimate section of the Emperor’s testamentary breviarium , dated 811, with which the Life concludes records that: ‘he decreed that the books of which he had assembled a great collection in his library’ ( magnam in bibliotheca sua copiam congregavit ) were to be available for purchase ‘at the appropriate price’ ( iusto pretio ) by anyone who wanted them, and the proceeds distributed to the poor. 1 Two other chapters in the Life hint at some of the books which were available in the bibliotheca in both the pre-Aachen and in the Aachen years. In the one devoted to Charles’s ‘habits’, we are told that at meals he would have read to him historiae et antiquorum res gestae (words that have been surprisingly variously understood!), 2 followed by the notorious claim that ‘he also delighted in the books of St. Augustine and especially those that are given the title De civitate Dei ’. In the following chapter, concerned with Charles’s studies or cultivation of the liberal arts, Einhard reports that he learnt grammatica from Peter of Pisa and that under the direction of Alcuin he ‘studied rhetoric, dialectic and especially astronomy’. Ten or fifteen years before the testamenta , the mostly derivative poem introducing a collection of extracts from patristic commentaries on the