The incunabula collection of the Benedictine library of S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. Formation, use and dispersal according to documentary and material evidence (from MEI)

The library of the Benedictine abbey of S. Giorgio Maggiore in Venice was scattered after the dissolution of the house in 1806. The reconstruction of its incunabula collection offers a test case for studying the effectiveness of a provenance methodology that combines material evidence (collected in the Material Evidence in Incunabula (MEI) database) with various forms of documentary evidence. The assumption that underlies the database is that in the total or partial absence of documentation, the books themselves may offer material evidence to tell the history of the collection . Ownership notes, historical bindings and decoration, and other marks, may be left on the books belonging to a single religious house, representing their purchase, donation, exchange, use, cataloguing, selling, or confiscation. The authors intend to show in the present article that an approach that collects and arranges these marks as they were applied over time and by different hands, on the printed books as well as the manuscript collection of the Benedictine library, may serve as a method for uncovering other histories of lost libraries. Moreover, coupling the provenance approach with archival research contributes significantly to the discovery of many more volumes no longer extant today (or whose whereabouts are not yet known) and sharpens the narrative of events regarding the circulation of the books after the dissolution of the library.