Die Bibliothek Konrad Peutingers

With some 10,000 individual titles in nearly 2,200 volumes, including 200 manuscripts, the library of the Augsburg town clerk and humanist Konrad Peutinger (1465-1547) was almost certainly the largest scholarly library of its era north of the Alps. The span of time covered by the publications ranged across the entire century from Gutenberg to Peutinger's death. Alongside substantial sections on grammar, literature, geography, philosophy, and theology the main body of the library was given over to works on history, rhetoric, and medicine, with a major section devoted to specialist legal writings and set up separately. Although the library was disbanded in the 18th century, the original holdings can be reconstructed almost in their entirety thanks to a new approach that, instead of restricting itself to lists of books still known to be in existence, proceeds on the basis of the historical catalogs that have come down to us. The detailed documentation of a library unique both in its size and in its range provides new insights into the working methods and the organization of knowledge employed by one of the key personalities of German humanism.