Biblioteca Mavrocordaților între legendă și realitate
The Library of the Mavrocordats between Legend and Reality

Summary/Abstract: As in other European countries, the first private Romanian libraries belonged to the rich and powerful, the only ones able to train themselves and afford to collect books. In the Romanian countries, there was no environment that would allow, if not stimulate, normal evolution of the library universe and due to the fact that power was often unstable and vulnerable. However, the emphasis shifted to diplomatic strategies during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The political power had to be informed, to resort to the ”power of the library”. In this context, the Romanian humanities libraries are obviously not created only for purely intellectual and aesthetic pleasure and the researchers' attempt to reconstruct them proves it. They often contain what was needed to be known for the political purposes pursued at the time.The history of Romanian libraries records quite a bit of information, most disparate, about the first libraries set up, because most of them were scattered or destroyed. In those days, the instability of the Power led to general instability, so that it was quite difficult to accumulate books and lay the foundations of a library on a scientific basis, when even the initiators of such actions often had a tragic destiny, destiny followed by their books. The Mavrocordats’ Library is one of them, occupying a special place in the cultural life of the Romanian countries both by the intrinsic value of the cultural act it represents and especially by the impact it had on their political and socio-cultural development, being impossible to dissociate the reforms of the Mavrocordats from their intellectual formation which, in turn, cannot be categorically dissociated from their books, and therefore from the library. In this article, we try to bring to the attention of connoisseurs the history of this library.

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