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Mirjam Foot, Reliures méédiévales des bibliothèques de France, IV: Bibliothèque municipale de Reims. By Jean-Louis Alexandre, Geneviève Grand, and Guy Lanoë., The Library, Volume 11, Issue 3, September 2010, Pages 353–356, https://doi.org/10.1093/library/11.3.353
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Extract
The admirable project to describe all pre-c. 1550 bindings in French libraries, the brainchild of Jean Vézin, taken on by the Institut de recherche et d'histoire des textes, has reached its fourth volume. In contrast to the more homogeneous collections of the libraries of Autun, Vendôme, and Orléans, that of the municipal library of Reims combines manuscripts from the cathedral with those from one Augustinian and three Benedictine abbeys, each with its own history. In a lengthy introduction, Guy Lanoë relates how the individual libraries developed, flourished, and declined.
The most important of the ecclesiastical libraries that together form the core of the municipal library was that of the cathedral. Its greatest treasures date from the Carolingian period and from the years either side of 1400. Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims (845–82) and Abbot of St Remi, founded the cathedral library and more than a hundred manuscripts written in Reims during his reign have survived. The library continued to grow and among its important donors was Guy de Roye (d. 1409), whose arms and/or inscriptions can be found on or in many of the volumes. Canon Gilles d'Aspremont (1384–1414) made an inventory when the library was rehoused in 1412. Several more inventories of the second half of the fifteenth century, two of them mentioning provenance and binding, show how the library continued to grow. A late-seventeenth-century catalogue notes repairs, reordering and rebinding. Of the 511 bindings from this collection, the majority date from the fifteenth century, followed by those from the sixteenth.
