Collections in Context: The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe

Karen Fresco

ISBN 10: 0814256414 / ISBN 13: 9780814256411

Published by Ohio State University Press, 2020

New copy - Usually dispatched within 4 working days. Seller Inventory # B9780814256411

Synopsis:

The fourteen essays that comprise Collections in Context: The Organization of Knowledge and Community in Europe interrogate questions posed by French, Flemish, English, and Italian collections of all sorts—libraries as a whole, anthologies and miscellanies assembled within a single manuscript or printed book, and even illustrated ivory boxes.

Collecting became an increasingly important activity during the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries, when the decreased cost of producing books made ownership available to more people. But the act of collecting is never neutral: it gathers information, orders material (especially linear texts), and prioritizes everything—in short, collecting both organizes and comments on knowledge. Moreover, the context of a collection must reveal something about identity, but whose? That of the compiler? The reader or viewer? The donor? The patron?
 

With essays by a wide array of international scholars, Collections in Context demonstrates that the very act of collecting inevitably imposes some kind of relationship among what might otherwise be naively thought of as disparate elements and simultaneously exposes something about the community that created and used the collection. Thus, Collections in Context offers unusual insights into how collecting both produced knowledge and built community in early modern Europe.

About the Author:
Karen Fresco is associate professor of French and Medieval studies at the University of Illinois. Anne D. Hedeman is professor of art history and Medieval studies at the University of Illinois.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Collections in Context: The Organization of ...
Publisher: Ohio State University Press
Publication Date: 2020
Binding: Paperback / softback
Condition: New