This volume, edited by Benedetta Valtorta and belonging to the series Millennio Medievale. Strumenti e studi, brings together a collection of studies by François Dolbeau, published to mark the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. It contains twelve articles: eleven of them originally appeared between 1978 and 2011 in scholarly journals and collective volumes, while one is published here for the first time. As its title suggests, the collection is devoted to medieval libraries, a subject to which Dolbeau has dedicated much of his scholarly career. His work is distinguished by meticulous attention to surviving manuscript catalogues and related documents, from which he reconstructs the history of libraries as institutions and, more broadly, the intellectual horizons of the communities that produced and used them.

Three of the contributions focus on the library of the Abbey of Lobbes, one of the ecclesiastical centers in medieval Hainault. The earliest, published in 1978, presents an edition of a seventeenth-century document containing both a list of abbots and a library catalogue. Dolbeau enriches this edition with a substantial commentary, in which he undertakes, among other things, to reconstruct the manuscript tradition of the document.

A second article, which appeared in 1979, offers a detailed analysis of the catalogue published in the earlier study, discussing at length the individual volumes listed in the inventory. Nearly three decades later, in 2007, Dolbeau returned to the subject in a fresh contribution, this time examining the Lobbes collection on the basis of additional documentary evidence. Taken together, these three essays chart the development of Dolbeau's thinking about the Lobbes library over time and exemplify his method of combining textual editing with historical reconstruction.

Two further studies are dedicated to the library of Saint-Remi in Reims, considered at two different points in its history: during the abbacy of Hincmar in the ninth century (the hitherto unpublished article) and in the thirteenth century. The earlier of the two published essays, which dates from 1988, reconstructs the holdings of the Benedictine abbey's library through an ingenious use of evidence. Dolbeau analyzes ex-libris inscriptions bearing numerical marks and compares them with three later documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth century that preserve fragments of a now-lost catalogue. On this basis he not only reconstructs the contents of the collection but also offers insights into the cataloguing system employed at Reims. The newly published essay addresses the same library from a different angle: it attempts to determine what resources were available during Hincmar's tenure as abbot. Such an inquiry is of considerable interest, since it allows the reader to glimpse the intellectual background of one of the most prominent theologians of the ninth century.

Another pair of studies, both published in 2011, turns to the Dominican library of Basel in the fifteenth century. These essays present and analyze two previously unpublished catalogue fragments, one alphabetical and the other topographical. Dolbeau edits the preserved fragments and accompanies them with detailed commentaries. These do not merely attempt to date and describe the documents but also identify the volumes listed and reconstruct the cataloguing practices of the Dominican convent. The result is a model of patient and precise scholarship, in which Dolbeau's investigations resemble a detective work.

The volume further contains three essays that each examine a different institution or documentary source. The first, originally published in 1988, determines the provenance of a catalogue contained in a codex preserved in Florence and edited a year earlier. The next article presents detailed analyses of two previously unpublished catalogues of medieval libraries, one probably originating from the canons of Champagne, the other most likely from a church in western or northwestern France. A further essay, also a reprint from 1988, records Dolbeau's identification of the provenance of three catalogues that had been published earlier without indication of their institutional origins. In this article, Dolbeau underscores the importance of assembling a critical corpus of medieval library inventories, which would make possible more systematic comparisons and a more comprehensive understanding of medieval book culture. Even though two of the catalogues overlap with information already available from other sources, the article remains of lasting value as a demonstration of Dolbeau's scholarly method and as a reminder of the interpretive potential of such documents.

The remaining two articles in the collection take a broader perspective on the functioning of medieval libraries. One focuses on the profile and practices of library users, while the other explores the relationships that connected ecclesiastical libraries to one another. Appropriately placed at the beginning of the volume, these essays provide readers with a general framework and thematic orientation before they proceed to the more detailed and specialized case studies that follow.

The decision to gather these essays into a single volume has proven judicious. Far from being merely a commemorative gesture, the collection serves a genuine scholarly purpose by making accessible in one place a series of studies that were previously dispersed across a range of publications. In so doing, it offers readers not only a set of detailed case studies but also a coherent panorama of Dolbeau's contribution to the study of medieval libraries. The juxtaposition of narrowly focused analyses with essays of a more general nature enables the reader to appreciate both the precision of Dolbeau's textual work and the broader implications of his research for the history of learning and the transmission of texts in the Middle Ages. The book thus succeeds in presenting medieval libraries simultaneously as concrete historical institutions, recoverable through painstaking examination of catalogues and documents, and as part of the wider intellectual landscape of medieval Europe.

Beata Spieralska-Kasprzyk