“And if the librarian notices anything, he has to report it”. Library Vigilance after the Printing Revolution

This article presents early modern institutional libraries as stages for different and sometimes competing arrangements of vigilance. It opens with the fire that occurred in the Library of Congress on Christmas Eve 1851, the reconstruction of the library after the fire, and then its re-conversion into a “Library for the Nation.” From there it steps back to the reorganization of institutional libraries that followed the invention of the printing press, when the model withdrawn at the end of the nineteenth century was actually first conceived. Through two small case studies, the article shows the interaction between rulers, high officials and lower officials in the management of paper archives, and the tension between absolutistic efforts and a complex social reality. The first case study focuses on the Ducal Library in Munich under the reign of Maximilian I of Bavaria. By ‘entering’ early modern rooms literally overcrowded with books, the uses and attempts to systematize thousands of unordered papers, it is possible to better understand the limit of an absolutistic model and of the conception of a central power able to master knowledge. The second case study deals with practices of vigilance developed by pre-modern librarians. In the absence of a proper professional code, the reorganization of libraries as scholarly enterprises and dynastic collections at the same time required scholars to develop a set of new strategies and techniques to virtually ‘see’ and watch over something that was no longer visible and not easy to control. Read together, these two scattered fragments in the long history of pre-modern libraries allow the heterogenous and not predetermined practices of observing and being observed that animated institutions in the pre-modern world to emerge.