Book Transfer Culture: Book Movements in Cities of the Baltic Sea Region as a Sideline of Early Modern Cultural History Research in East Central Europe

Abstract

In recent decades, book archaeological studies have shown that Early Modern book movements in the Baltic region were particularly pronounced at the time of the Lutheran Refor-mation. In view of the movements of a Melchior Hofmann, a Johannes Block, a Nikolaus Russ or a Sveno Jakobi, their handwritten entries point fragmentarily to the confessional affinities of their owners, but above all to the connections of former networks that had ex-isted between the merchants, craftsmen and clergymen of the Hanseatic cities, and that de-termined the ruling, scientific and economic-political interrelationships of that time.
Books of the sixteenth century testify not only to an enormous mobility of their owners, but also to forms of cultural appropriation between individual appreciation, tradition, or antiquarian interest which emerged from the beginning of the Early Modern period and which brought books from different printing places, binding places and contexts of use into the libraries of the Hanseatic cities. Provided that this is the case, one can certainly speak of a book transfer culture and make it a topic within Early Modern cultural history research, which concerns regions of East Central Europe in particular.