From Clairvaux to Montpellier: 900 Years of Light
The University Medical Library is showcasing one of its treasures: the manuscripts from Clairvaux Abbey preserved in Montpellier. This exhibition is also a journey in search of knowledge, from medieval scribes to the spirit of the Enlightenment.
In 2015, we celebrate its 900th anniversary. In 1115, its founding by Saint Bernard enabled the Cistercian Order to spread throughout Europe… The famous and prolific Abbey of Clairvaux quickly became a vibrant spiritual and intellectual center, thanks in large part to its encyclopedic library, consisting of manuscripts copied and illuminated by the abbey’s monks.
Bringing knowledge together
In the early19th century, Gabriel Prunelle discovered and tapped into this gold mine. Tasked with establishing a library for the Montpellier School of Medicine, this bibliophile and scholar drew upon the abbey’s rich collections, which had been confiscated during the Revolution. Seven centuries apart, the abbots of Clairvaux and the Montpellier librarian pursued the same quest: to gather existing knowledge.
In the meantime, the spirit of the Enlightenment had taken hold. Gabriel Prunelle believed that his students should be familiar with the best of all disciplines, not just medicine. He was part of a mission tasked with surveying France’s “literary repositories”—collections formed during the revolutionary seizures—to select the works he deemed essential.
Thus, he selected 72 manuscripts from the library of the famous Cistercian abbey, covering all disciplines—from religious texts to medicine, including philosophy, history, and the sciences—mirroring the encyclopedic library he wished to establish at the medical school. In total, he sent 1,000 manuscripts and 80,000 printed works to Montpellier, thus creating a rich and varied collection covering all fields of knowledge.
A virtual library and an exhibition
Today, thanks to an initiative by the Médiathèque du Grand Troyes, the 1,100 surviving manuscripts from the medieval library of Clairvaux have been digitized and are available to everyone online in the“Virtual Library of Clairvaux – 1472.”
Seventy-two of these manuscripts are housed at the Interuniversity Library of Montpellier (BIU). The University Medical Library, the conservation-restoration workshop, and the digitization workshop at the BIU collaborated closely to carry out the digitization.
In Montpellier, the exhibition “The Art of Knowledge” invites visitors to discover a selection of these manuscripts, written between the 12th and 15th centuries. Among them is a12th-century “legendary,” a gem from a collection rarely shown to the public. The display cases also highlight the materials, methods, and various stages involved in the production of a manuscript, shedding light on the conditions under which knowledge was produced in the late Middle Ages.
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