[6] Parthey (Alexandrinisches Museum) assigns topographical reasons for doubting this story.
[7] Some of the authorities have been collected by Parthey, op. cit.
[8] The oldest catalogue of a western library is that of the monastery of Fontanelle in Normandy compiled in the 8th century. Many catalogues may be found in the collections of D’Achery, Martene and Durand, and Pez, in the bibliographical periodicals of Naumann and Petzholdt and the Centralblatt f. Bibliothekswissenschaft. The Rev. Joseph Hunter has collected some particulars as to the contents of the English monastic libraries, and Ed. Edwards has printed a list of the catalogues (Libraries and Founders of Libraries, 1865, pp. 448-454). See also G. Becker, Catalogi Bibliothecarum Antiqui (1885). There are said to be over six hundred such catalogues in the Royal Library at Munich. In the 14th century the Franciscans compiled a general catalogue of the MSS. in 160 English libraries and about the year 1400 John Boston, a Benedictine monk of Bury, travelled over England and a part of Scotland and examined the libraries of 195 religious houses (Tanner, Bibliotheca Brit. Hibern. 1748). Leland’s list of the books he found during his visitation of the houses in 1539-1545 is printed in his Collectanea (ed. Hearne, 1715, 6 vols.). T. W. Williams has treated Gloucestershire and Bristol medieval libraries and their catalogues in a paper in the Bristol and Gloucestershire Arch. Soc. vol. xxxi.
[9] This subject has been specially treated by J. Willis Clark in several works, of which the chief is a masterly volume, The Care of Books (1901). See also Dom Gasquet, “On Medieval Monastic Libraries,” in his Old English Bible (1897).
[10] Among the Arabs, however, as among the Christians, theological bigotry did not always approve of non-theological literature, and the great library of Cordova was sacrificed by Almanzor to his reputation for orthodoxy, 978 A.D.
[11] Guide to Librarianship by J. D. Brown (1909).
LIBRATION (Lat. libra, a balance), a slow oscillation, as of a balance; in astronomy especially the seeming oscillation of the moon around her axis, by which portions of her surface near the edge of the disk are alternately brought into sight and swung out of sight.