The Library of the Physician Romolo Spezioli (Fermo 1642-Rome 1723): An Example of the History of Medical Libraries

The main purpose of bibliography is to reconstruct the intellectual history of a civilization through the organization and the study of the manuscript or printed documents it left. This means that the history of bibliography relates to the history of ideas and of their communication, in part by defming the significant bibliographical categories in which a society located those ideas. Even if every library collection is unique in itself, being created under a variety of different historical circumstances, it also forms part of the wider bibliographical map of its society and civilization, whether attention is focussed on a collection as a whole or on individual parts thereof. In this way, a history of bibliographical ideas can supplement traditional history of libraries, which has concentrated on their institutional development, on the history of printing or codicology. To an understanding of how a collection came into being, one can add information on the ways it was organised intellectually, as well as physically, in order to throw light on the role of libraries in the intellectual world of the time. Alfredo Serrai's studies of bibliographical classifications,1 for instance form a contribution to the history of philosophy, not just of library science. Such a project, trying to place the history of libraries within a broader cultural history, is clearest when