From Clairvaux to Montpellier, 900 years of light
The University Library of Medicine exhibits one of its treasures: the manuscripts from the Abbey of Clairvaux preserved in Montpellier. The exhibition is also a journey in search of knowledge, from medieval copyists to the spirit of the Enlightenment.
The abbey celebrates 900 years of existence in 2015. Founded in 1115 by St. Bernard, the Cistercian order spread throughout Europe... The famous and prolific Abbey of Clairvaux quickly became an intense spiritual and intellectual center, thanks in particular to its encyclopedic library, made up of manuscripts copied and illuminated by the abbey's monks.
Gathering knowledge
In the early 19th century, Gabriel Prunelle discovered and exploited this gold mine. Charged with building a library for Montpellier's Faculty of Medicine, this bibliophile and erudite physician dipped into the abbey's rich holdings, confiscated during the French Revolution. Seven centuries apart, the abbots of Clairvaux and the librarian from Montpellier were pursuing the same quest: to bring together existing knowledge.
In the meantime, the spirit of the Enlightenment had come and gone. Gabriel Prunelle felt that his students needed to know the best of all disciplines, not just medicine. He was part of a mission to tour France's "literary repositories", set up during the revolutionary seizures, to select the works he considered essential.
He thus chose 72 manuscripts from the library of the famous Cistercian abbey, covering all disciplines, from religious books to medicine, philosophy, history and science, in the image of the encyclopedic library he wanted to establish at the Faculty of Medicine. In all, he sent 1,000 manuscripts and 80,000 printed works to Montpellier, creating a rich and varied collection covering all fields of knowledge.
A virtual library and an exhibition
Today, on the initiative of the Médiathèque du Grand Troyes, the 1,100 surviving manuscripts of the medieval library of Clairvaux have been digitized and are accessible to all online, in the "Bibliothèque virtuelle de Clairvaux - 1472".
72 of these manuscripts are held at the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Montpellier (BIU). The University Library of Medicine, the BIU conservation-restoration workshop and the BIU digitization workshop worked closely together to digitize them.
In Montpellier, a selection of these manuscripts, written between the 12th and 15th centuries, are on show at the "L'Art du savoir" exhibition. Among them is a 12th-century "légendier", the jewel in the crown of a collection rarely shown to the public. The showcases also reveal the materials, methods and different stages 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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