Reconstructing the Librairie du Louvre
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Abstract
Over the course of nearly six decades (1368–1435), Charles V’s Librairie du Louvre was the center of the Valois court, serving as a place where people could read, browse, and borrow its religious texts, scientific works, political treatises, and pieces of chivalric literature. However, the royal library’s dispersal and the destruction of the medieval Louvre palace in the early modern period, removed many traces of it as a physical space. Since the surviving evidence primarily consists of inventories listing the Librairie’s collection, most scholars describe it as a static collection of books. This article reconstructs the Librairie du Louvre using its contemporary inventories (dating from 1373 to 1423–1424) to demonstrate that the royal library was a significant part of the sociocultural landscape of the Valois court and that its spatial arrangement encouraged people to actively interact with its collection as readers, browsers, and borrowers. To supplement the inventories, I explore the Librairie’s spatial dynamics through models that I drew on my basketball court and designed in the video game, Minecraft, and through Adobe Dimension. The models, along with the inventories, reveal new information, challenge assumptions, and expand scholarly understandings of the royal library.
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