As the readers of this blog already know, my interest in Central European discussions on calendar reform and technical chronology was inspired by the fact that among the books owned by Joannes Broscius, there is a considerable number of volumes related to these issues and these volumes contain Broscius’s marginalia, notes on endleafs and underlinings. Broscius was a careful yet chaotic reader and I already learned this when I studied his marginalia related to the doctrine of Ramus. This irregularity was confirmed when it came to the chase of astronomical and chronological volumes he might have owned. A number of possible titles got confirmed but they did not reveal any notes left by him besides his ownership marks, while some other titles turned out an incredibly helpful source of information about his general reading strategies as well as the way he filtered and digested the astronomical and historical volumes trying to formulate an argument supporting the acknowledgement of Gregorian calendar by the Uniates.
While I still have a long list of titles and names I need to check on the next occasion of visit to Cracow, I am fully aware that the to date research related to Broscius’s reading methods do not exhaust all the possibilities. Thanks to the studies published by Janusz Gruchała and Elżbieta Pytlarz we know a lot about the way he read classical literature and studied his copy of Vitruvius’ De architectura and I hope that my studies on Broscius Ramist and chronological reading lists can also be counted as a modest share in research dedicated to his scholarly workshop.
However, there is still a number of threads that are awaiting scholars who would like to follow them and broaden thus our knowledge about the way Broscius worked with texts and how he transformed his reader’s findings into his own work. I believe that almost every book or brochure published by Broscius can be linked to and collated with a corpus of annotated books from his library and the only basic problem is the lack of a map that would lead the scholars to these volumes. Historians of the book and reading as well as historians of early modern science are awaiting the publication of the catalogue of Broscius’s library which is being prepared by Dr. Marian Malicki from the Old Prints Department of the Jagiellonian Library. However, untill the catalogue sees the daylight, every scholar who would be interested in reconstructing the web spun by Broscius between particular volumes, has to order, let’s say, five copies of the same title held at the Jagiellonian Library or all books of one author in order to verify if any of these copies bears any marks of Broscius’s works.
Although my life and life of other scholars who share the interested in Broscius would be easier if we had this catalogue on our bookshelves, this situation has some obvious advantages and one of them is the pleasure of discovering everything on one’s own. Until now, I carried out my provenance research related to Broscius only at the Jagiellonian Library, although I knew that few volumes he owned can be found at the University Library in Warsaw and the Ossolineum in Wrocław. I also knew that there is a number of titles from his library, which, at some point in the 19th century, disappeared from the Jagiellonian Library and are now considered to be lost or dissolved in some private collections.
Until last Thursday, I assumed that these research procedures are site-specific and that my research regarding Broscius is forever connected to the collections of the Jagiellonian Library and the list of minor exceptions mentioned above only confirms this. On Thursday it turned out that this list should be extended and that I should keep my eyes open.
Due to personal and scholarly reasons, my life spreads between two cities – Warsaw where I work and Toruń where most of my personal life takes place. From the scholarly point of view, this gives me an opportunity for crop-rotating as I have regular access to special collections in both cities, with the University Library, the National Library and few other institutions in Warsaw and the Nicolaus Copernicus University Library and the Copernicus Regional Library in Toruń. Since the special collections at the latter will remain closed until early 2015 due to the major renovation, my attention turned on the first library. The collection of manuscripts and early modern books at the University Library is a product of a process which took place after the WWII and the main body of the collection was created from the manuscripts and books which were brought in to Toruń from such cities as Königsberg (now Kaliningrad in Russia), Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland) and Greifswald. But the collection of rare prints was developed even after the postwar process of ‘securing’ the historical collections ended and the librarians kept buying the books at the antiquarian market.
Besides the opportunity to have the material access to the titles of my interest instead of reading the PDF’s on the screen or from the printout, I am also visiting the Toruń University Library quite regularly out of pure curiosity. I have got my checklist of titles related to the subject of my research and I am torturing the librarians with order slips in hope that I will find some annotated volumes that could shed some light on the reception of the chronological and calendrical discussions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Last Thursday, I filled in a next bundle of order slips and that’s how the proper part of the story, to be told in the next post, began. And it began with a mistake, a simple one yet fraught in consequences.
T.B.C.
Chronologia Universalis 