A History of Bibliographies of Bibliographies

Beginnings of the Bibliography of Bibliographies

The introduction to St. Jerome's De viris illustribus written in A.D. 392 may contain the first bibliography of bibliographies. Here we find a list of nine men who had written bibliographies of various kinds. St. Jerome writes as follows:

You urge me, Dexter, to arrange ecclesiastical writers in imitation of Suetonius[1] and to do for men of our faith what he has done in listing men famous in heathen letters. Among the Greeks some have done the same thing: Hermippus Peripateticus,[2] Antigonus Carystius,[3] the learned Satyrus,[4] and Aristoxenus, the musician,[5] who was by far the most learned, [and] furthermore, among the Romans, Varro,[6] Santra,[7] Nepos, Hyginus, and Suetonius, whom you cite as a model.[8]

After a brief digression St. Jerome refers to Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, which he has found very useful, and then concludes with an allusion to Cicero, whom few would now think of as a bibliographer. In this passage he makes it clear that bibliography was not highly esteemed even in A.D. 392:

And so I pray to the Lord Jesus Christ that, since your master Cicero, who stood at the pinnacle of Roman eloquence, has not disdained to compile a list of orators in the Latin language in his Brutus, I may execute such a task worthily, pursuant to your request, by listing the writers of His church.

St. Jerome's list is an altogether acceptable bibliography of bibliographies. It includes Antigonus Carystius and Satyrus who wrote general biobibliographies, and Aristoxenus who listed the pupils of Isocrates or the writers of tragedy. We can infer that St. Jerome saw a common element in the works of all these men. This common element is the idea of a list or bibliography. Had he cited only writers of general biobibliographies, we might imagine that he thought of them as historians or chroniclers. In the context of an introduction to his own bibliography of Christian writers he must have thought of them as bibliographers. He neglected to mention many other early bibliographers with whom he was probably familiar.

Almost thirteen centuries later Philip Labbé, whom we shall learn to know as the first author of a bibliography of bibliographies to be published as a separate work, found St. Jerome's list and after making some additions, put it in alphabetical order. He could not find a proper place for it in his own bibliography of bibliographies, the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum of 1664, and buried it without any apparent reason immediately after a reference to a book by Constantinus Felicius that dealt with Cicero's exile and glorious return. I suspect that the slip containing this information had been misplaced in his manuscript. Labbé wrote as follows:

Besides Damastes Sigiaeus,[9] many have written on the lives of scholars, for example, Agatharcides of Cnidus,[10] Amphicrates,[11] Antigonus Carystius, Aristoxenus, Artemon of Magnesia,[12] the Carthaginian Charon,[13] Clearchus of Soli,[14] Hermippus of Smyrna, Satyrus, Timagenes of Miletus,[15] and others, and among Latin writers, Varro, Santra, Nepos, [and] Hyginus, whom St. Jerome cites along with Suetonius on p. 62.[16]

Labbé's careless treatment of this information suggests that he had not finished preparing it for publication. The text itself is not entirely intelligible. He did not put it, as St. Jerome had done, in the introduction and failed to find any other logical place for it. St. Jerome's list obviously interested Labbé, for he quoted it again in the article "Sanctus Hieronymus." When Antoine Teissier revised and enlarged the Bibliotheca bibliothecarum in 1686, he came upon this duplication and retained only the passage in the article "Sanctus Hieronymus."

Except the long-forgotten Labbé, subsequent bibliographers know nothing of St. Jerome's brief list. It did not set anyone to writing bibliographies of bibliographies, and no example has been reported in the almost uncharted area of bibliographical history that lies between St. Jerome and the Renaissance.

Modern bibliographies of bibliographies begin as sections in general subject indexes. In any such index bibliography is, as a matter of course, represented. Conrad Gesner's Pandectae, 1548,[16a] which is the first subject index to be printed, begins with bibliography. The first book (liber) of the Pandectae is entitled "De grammatica" and deals with the classification and organization of knowledge.[17] Chapter (titulus) XIII, with which we are especially concerned, is a treatise on general bibliography.[18] Its eight sections (partes) deal with books of general usefulness and some related matters. Pars i, "Greek and Latin Writers of Miscellanies and of Books Containing Critical Comments on More than One Author," is well described by its title. Gesner divides it into two parts: "Greek Miscellanies," including such works as Aelian, Varia historia;[19] Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae;[20] Clement of Alexandria, Stromata;[21] and Johannes Tzetzes, Historia varia.[22] Books of this sort were reference works consulted for information on almost any subject. To this alphabetical list Gesner adds three titles: the accounts of marvels found in various works by Aristotle; Julius Pollux, Onomasticon; and Plutarch, Symposium.[23] For a bibliography of books of table talk similar to Plutarch's work Gesner refers the reader to Liber Politica, Titulus Convivia.[24] He adds a concluding remark that Caelius Rhodiginus and Nicolaus Leonicenus-men who had written widely used contemporary miscellanies-as well as other makers of compilations have drawn freely on the authorities that he has listed. Gesner is a good bibliographer. He has arranged these titles carefully and has clearly indicated how much he knows about them and the translations of them.

The second part of Titulus XIII, Pars i, is devoted to Latin miscellanies. It begins with Alexander ab Alexandro (Alessandro Alessandri, d. 1523), Geniales dies, "which contains grammatical and legal collectanea and comments on various authors." Gesner remarks that he has preferred to cite miscellanies and collections of loci communes because a separately printed treatise can be easily found but the information in a miscellany is likely to be overlooked.[25] He then names some fifteen Latin miscellanies of various dates according to the first names of the authors. Among them are the writings of Angelo Poliziano, Aulus Gellius, the Adagia of Erasmus, the Varia of Cassiodorus, the Saturnalia of Macrobius, the De honesta disciplina by Petrus Crinitus, and the De inventoribus rerum by Polydore Vergil. This mingling of classical and contemporary authorities is characteristic of Renaissance scholarship. Gesner concludes with a citation of a quarto Miscellanea printed in Paris by Gormont and written by an unidentified author (nescio quo authore).[26]

Gesner's free use of cross-references shows how carefully he planned his book. For example, he reminds the reader that miscellanies dealing with such natural objects as metals, stones, animals, and plants will be found in the book entitled Physica,[27] those concerned with the words and deeds of famous men will be found in Caelius Rhodiginus,[28] and epistolographers, who may be thought of as authors of books of a miscellaneous character, will be found in a later section.[29] In a subdivision indicated by a paragraph sign but without a centerhead Gesner says that dictionaries contain miscellaneous information, cites examples, and adds a cross-reference to his discussion of dictionaries. As is evident, he has covered the sources of miscellaneous information rather fully.

In a second division of this part Gesner names writers who have written comments on several authors and have printed them in a single volume. He cites eleven examples, beginning with Bassianus Landus (Bassiano Landi, d. 1562), Epiphyllides[30] and including the manuscript notes of his contemporary, the Neapolitan grammarian, L. J. Scoppa. Since the Epiphyllides does not seem to have been printed and a contemporary scholar's manuscript notes are obviously difficult to find, Gesner can be said to have taken great pains with the list. He excludes those who have written one or more volumes of commentary on a single author.

In Pars ii, De indicibus librorum, an extremely interesting discussion of indexes with rather little bibliographical baggage, Gesner differentiates and discusses several varieties and brings his discussion of methods to a close with some remarks about page numbers and chapter numbers.[31] A paragraph sign sets off a list of indexes to various books, chiefly editions of the classics and Biblical or patristic writings. This list would have been very useful to H. B. Wheatley in writing What is an Index? (London, 1879). On the next page (fols. 21a-21b) Gesner names a few publishers' catalogues and, after a paragraph sign, a few library catalogues.[32] Pars ii ends with a long discussion of the ways of cataloguing books (fols. 21b-22b).

Pars iii, Problemata, Quaestiones & Disputationes, is a strictly bibliographical account of special varieties of miscellanies.[33] The next two Partes contain a discussion of the methodology of note-taking and are not directly bibliographical in nature. Pars vi lists some forty collections of commonplaces (fols. 27b-28a). Among them are Antonius Corvinus's arrangement of Erasmus's Apophthegmata in commonplaces,[34] Stobaeus, Thomas Hibernicus,[35] Maximus Planudes (who expurgated and arranged the Greek Anthology in loci communes), Otto Brunfels (whose Pandectae sacrae[36] Gesner has used freely), and Valerius Maximus. Such books were more or less like general reference works. Here, as elsewhere, Gesner names classical and contemporary writers in a single list.

We have been examining thus far Gesner's account of general reference works and come finally to the seventh pars, which is the most interesting division of the titulus for a student of bibliographical history. It is entitled Bibliographies, i.e. alphabetical list of catalogues of books, the classification of books, the care of them, mottoes, and the buildings.[37] This title is virtually the table of contents of a handbook of library science.[38] We shall consider only the first sections of this pars and in particular Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies.

Gesner begins the seventh pars with miscellaneous notes on pertinent books and on libraries. He carefully separates these notes from the following bibliography of bibliographies. This is an alphabetical list of thirty-one names, beginning with

Alberti Magni de antiquis authorib. astronomiae liber[39] Amphicrates de viris illustrib. scripsit, Athenaeo teste Apollodorus Athenien. Bibliothecae pars etiamnun extat.

In this list Gesner includes both general and special bibliographies. He cites St. Jerome's De scriptoribus ecclesiasticis (a variant title of the De viris illustribus) and the continuations by Bede, Gennadius of Marseilles, Honorius Augustodunensis, Isidore of Seville, and Sigebert of Gembloux; Johannes Tritheim, who compiled the original work of St. Jerome and the continuations into a single volume; and Sophronius, who translated it into Greek. He cites contemporary legal bibliographies, one by Bernardinus Rutilius (Bernardino Rutilio, 1504-1538), who dealt with men of his own time, and another by Johannes Fichardus (Johann Fichard, 1512-1581), the often published Juris consultorum vitae veterum quidem, which surveyed older authorities.[40] He has seen or heard of Jacob Rueff's survey of astrologers, Lilio Gregorio Giraldi's literary history, Otto Brunfels's bibliography of medicine in classical times, and Philip Ribot's biobibliographical dictionary of the Carmelite order. The last he has not seen but believes to have been utilized by Johannes Tritheim.

These names illustrate the variety of bibliographies known to Gesner and his clear conception of what a bibliography of bibliographies should be. He has admitted only pertinent books and has arranged their titles carefully in alphabetical order according to first names. He has given sources for citations that he has not verified and for books that he knows to be in manuscript or probably lost. He has commented occasionally on the quality of a book or has told how it was arranged. For example, he says that Rueff's astrological bibliography contains pictures of men and instruments and comments in German verse. He does not give the dates and places of publication, but bibliographers have been slow to learn the importance of citing these details. No doubt he expected his readers to consult his biobibliographical dictionary, the Bibliotheca universalis of 1545, for that information. A sixteenth-century scholar, who was accustomed to find books arranged according to format, might have complained that Gesner did not indicate the size of the books. In his procedure he goes beyond St. Jerome, who was content to cite only names. Gesner cites titles.

In Pars viii, "De mirabilibus," the last subdivision of Titulus XIII, Gesner gives a hasty account of books about marvels and noteworthy things. Although he cites several lost classical works on the subject and Alessandro Alessandri, Geniales dies, which had appeared in print a generation before the Pandectae, he makes no great effort to deal bibliographically with the subject. He obviously regards such works as collections of odds and ends and therefore akin to miscellanies. He says, for example, that geographers tell strange tales about the shapes and manners of men and the nature of countries, skies, and seas. He could, he says, have given here references to ancient statues and inscriptions, but has preferred to classify them under history. Poetry and invented tales might also be mentioned and riddles, he thinks, are not to be neglected. The remaining tituli of the first book deal with matters akin to grammar in its usual modern sense but include several specialized bibliographies that we need not examine closely.[41] Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies represents an auspicious beginning of a very difficult variety of bibliography.

The foregoing details about the first book in Gesner's Pandectae make clear Gesner's skill in organization and classification as well as the place that the bibliography of bibliographies had in his scheme. They give some notion of sixteenth-century scholarship and explain why Gesner's Pandectae failed to be continued or revised and, more especially, why his bibliography of bibliographies has not been noticed. Even A. G. S. Josephson, who had a very sharp eye for bibliographies of bibliographies concealed as chapters in subject indexes, did not come upon Gesner's work. Josephson's study will be mentioned in its proper place at the end of this essay. Gesner's subject bibliography was not appreciated fully because it contained many references to classical sources and did not give a comprehensive account of contemporary writings. Although Gesner's classification was logical and although he adhered with remarkable care to the categories that he set up, no one but Gesner himself could make additions to the book or revise it.

It remains to say a word about the relation of the Pandectae to the book of which it forms a part. Gesner published four volumes-the Bibliotheca universalis of 1545, the Pandectae of 1548, the Partitiones of 1549, and the Appendix of 1555-that are ordinarily regarded as a single work. The Bibliotheca and the Appendix constitute a biobibliographical dictionary. The Pandectae and the Partitiones are a subject index that lacks a promised section on medicine. The dictionary and the index have no close relations to each other, except to the degree that the dictionary gives additional information about books cited by authors' names in the index. In Gesner's situation a modern scholar would have distributed according to subjects the slips that he had made for his biobibliographical dictionary and would thus have obtained a subject index almost immediately. Gesner did not proceed in this way, but undertook and completed the subject index as a virtually independent work.

The next man to write a bibliography of bibliographies gives no evidence of having read Gesner's work or, more specifically, of having come upon Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies. He is Israel Spach (1560-1610), who wrote a general subject index at the end of the sixteenth century. In the bibliographical section, "Writers of Bibliographies (Bibliothecarum scriptores)," of his Nomenclator philosophorum et philologicorum, (1598), Spach names twenty-nine books. Of these only two medical and two legal bibliographies were known to Gesner, and one of these legal bibliographies is cited in a better edition that appeared long after the publication of the Pandectae. Spach's emphasis lies on contemporary works. Although he mentions the medieval continuators of St. Jerome, he does not mention St. Jerome himself. Inasmuch as these continuators were brought together in Johannes Tritheim, De viris illustribus, which he cites,[42] he could have dispensed with them. He begins with Antoine du Verdier's supplement (1585) to Gesner's Bibliotheca universalis and then mentions Apollodorus, whose Bibliotheca was still unpublished. Apollodorus and Claudius Ptolemy, Sententiae (also unpublished) are the only two bibliographers of classical times that he names. Spach knows general works like Conrad Gesner's Bibliotheca, Robert Constantin's compilation (1555) that purported to be a supplement to it, and Nicolaus Basse's cumulation (1592) of the semi-annual catalogues of the German booktrade; national bibliographies like Anton Francesco Doni's La libraria (1556)[43] and John Bale's list of English authors; and, finally, bibliographies of special disciplines like ecclesiastical history, medicine (Otto Brunfels and Symphorien Champier), and law. In these categories he has chosen appropriate books. Although he includes Hierimias Paduanus, who wrote a very popular collection of loci communes that circulated also under the name of Thomas Hibernicus (Thomas Palmer),[44] he agrees with Gesner in preferring to list such works separately.

In the fifty years between the publication of Gesner's Pandectae and Spach's Nomenclator bibliographers had come to recognize the value of several kinds of compilations that Gesner had not chosen to include. For example, Spach cites the catalogues issued by publishers,[45] a category that Gesner knew but separated from his bibliography of bibliographies. He includes some titles that most bibliographers would not now include in a bibliography of bibliographies, for example, a book dealing with the book trade,[46] a book dealing with a particular library,[47] a famous catalogue of Greek manuscripts at Augsburg.[48] Titles such as Wolfgang Lazius, Catalogus partim suorum, partim aliorum scriptorum[49] do not indicate clearly the contents of the book. Spach has thrown his net wide and has caught some fish that we can not call bibliographies. Nevertheless, all the works that he cites deal with books, and we shall not quarrel with him for including treatises on the Frankfurt book fair or the Vatican library. Two titles show how widely he ranged in the search for materials. John Boston's fourteenth-century union catalogue of manuscripts owned in England has come to his knowledge,[50] and he has picked up Claudius Ptolemy, Sententiae sive de utilitate librorum,[51] which was, in one form or another, a popular book about books during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Spach's omission of regional or national bibliographies and biobibliographical dictionaries, except for Bale and Doni, and of biobibliographical dictionaries of the religious orders is obvious. Perhaps he regarded them as historical rather than bibliographical reference works.

As we have seen, Spach offers a good account of sixteenth-century bibliographies and especially of those published in the latter half of the century. When taken in conjunction with Gesner's earlier bibliography, which reviewed classical writers and his own contemporaries, Spach's list provides us with a good account of sixteenth-century bibliography.

The bibliographical section, "Writers of Bibliographies (Bibliothecarum Scriptores)," in a general subject index entitled Bibliotheca philosophica (1616) by Paulus Bolduanus continues the tradition represented by Gesner and Spach. I have not been able to learn much about the life and works of this obscure Pomeranian minister of the gospel, who apparently lived and died in or near the village of Stolp.[52] He wrote bibliographies of theology, history, and philosophy between 1614 and 1622, publishing in the latter year a supplement to his theological bibliography. Petzholdt rightly commends (pp. 458-459) the Bibliotheca philosophica as superior to Spach's Nomenclator but curiously fails to see that Bolduan's notion of philosophy was in general use in the first half of the seventeenth century. A bibliotheca philosophica of that time would include as a matter of course everything but theology, law, and medicine. Petzholdt praises (pp. 771-772) Bolduan's Bibliotheca historica (1620) as a respectable work that shows bibliographical skill and accuracy. These are kinder words than Petzholdt can ordinarily find for a seventeenth-century bibliography and are a corrective to Burkhard Gotthelf Struve's harsh judgment: "In our day, when other works of this sort are available, we can easily dispense with these efforts."[53]

Bolduan's bibliography of bibliographies[54] is both longer and more carefully made than Spach's. He has arranged nearly seventy titles alphabetically according to the first names of the authors. He cites catalogues of university libraries (only the Leyden catalogue of 1595 could have been within Spach's reach and he did not know it), the compilations made for the book trade by Nicolaus Basse, Johannes Clessius, and Henning Grosse, the ubiquitous publisher's lists issued by Goltzius and Oporinus, and bibliographical dictionaries of various subjects and the religious orders. Like Spach, whose list he seems to have taken over completely, he has heard of John Boston's catalogue and, like Spach, is ignorant of the author's first name and is compelled to cite it under "Bostonus." He corrects Spach's misspelling of Muzio Pansa's name. He does not, however, include any classical Greek or Latin bibliographers. We can therefore infer that he did not find Gesner's bibliography of bibliographies, where they were mentioned. He might have omitted them on principle, but he also fails to mention some early sixteenth-century bibliographies known to Gesner which he would surely have included, had he known them. An example of such a bibliography is Jacob Rueff's book on astrology. Bolduan names no title that cannot be called a bibliography in some sense. In both extent and accuracy he surpasses Spach. As comparison with Theodore Besterman, The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography,[55] shows, this competent workman gives a good account of the bibliographies available in 1616.

A dozen years later, in 1628, Franciscus Sweertius (Francis Sweerts, 1567-1629) printed a bibliography of bibliographies about as large as that by Bolduan. He does not cite his predecessors and probably did not know them. This learned Antwerp merchant and author of several scholarly works printed his bibliography of bibliographies in his Athenae Belgicae.[56] It has no organic relation to Sweerts's purpose of writing a Belgian biobibliographical dictionary. In this compilation, which has a slightly stronger theological tinge than its predecessors, Sweerts lists seventy-eight bibliographies in twenty paragraphs according to subjects. This is, therefore, the first classified bibliography of bibliographies. Except in five instances with such headings as "De Bibliothecis" and "De Vitis & Scriptoribus Ord. S. Dominici," the subjects are to be inferred from the typographical arrangement. Although he has not completely worked out a scheme of organization, he progresses from general works on libraries and books to special bibliographies of theology, law, and medicine. He is less careful than Spach and Bolduan about the bibliographical details of place and date of publication, but the need for this information was just beginning to be recognized at the time when he wrote. He adheres closely to the idea of listing bibliographies and admits only one perhaps pardonable interloper, a compilation of the Church Fathers. It is curious that he cites the Bibliotheca theologica by Johannes Molanus (Jean van der Meulen), which was published in 1618, as being still in manuscript. Later bibliographers have picked up all the titles cited by Sweerts and his selection does not differ sufficiently from that made by Spach and Bolduan to need characterization by quoting titles. Sweerts wrote the first independent or almost independent bibliography of bibliographies and at the same time the first classified bibliography of bibliographies.

The four bibliographies of bibliographies published in the eighty years between Gesner's Pandectae (1548) and Sweert's Athenae Belgicae (1628) are, as their authors intended them to be, relatively complete. In The Beginnings of Systematic Bibliography, Theodore Besterman adds only a few rather unimportant titles and these may indeed not have seemed to be bibliographies or to have deserved mention in the eyes of Gesner and his successors. Instructive technical developments are evident in these first four compilations. Gesner cites both classical Greek and Latin works and contemporary bibliographies. Spach, Bolduan, and Sweerts adopt the modern practice of preferring to list bibliographies of contemporary usefulness. Gesner, Spach, and Bolduan do not separate their work from the larger task of writing a general subject index. Sweerts sees that the bibliography of bibliographies can be an independent enterprise. Gesner, Spach, and Bolduan offer alphabetical lists. Sweerts adopts the modern plan of a classified list. Although the bibliography of bibliographies has continued to be a necessary part of a general subject index, I shall limit myself in the following discussion to bibliographies of bibliographies that have been published as separate works.