It proposed a visible history of paleography in France and other countries, integrated into a wider history of the book from Antiquity to modern times. The presentation of 363 manuscripts divided into ten sections expressed some of the major interests of Delisle as administrator, librarian and scholar. The Bibliothèque wanted to offer the public an overview of the site and the gorgeous Galerie Mazarine was an important part of it. As we are preparing for the reopening of the Galerie Mazarine in 2020, we are examining the choice of manuscripts made by curators at the end of the nineteenth. Today, the Library is undergoing a major refurbishment project which began in 2009. In 1878, people coming to the Bibliothèque nationale could see a permanent exhibition of books and manuscripts recently organized in the Galerie Mazarine. The assiduity with which the books were bought stresses the bishop's obvious desire to compile a scientific library capable of rising to the level of those in the rest of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century. Though in this correspondence information on the requested books is often lacunal, I was able to identify some of the works. Such data can be found in the correspondence between the two scholars that is preserved in the collection of the Batthyaneum Library in Alba Iulia. The period in which Dániel bought books at the bishop's request stretches, from data I was able to collect so far, between the time when Batthyány was still in Eger (1780) and Dániel was a student in Vienna, and the final months of 1785, when Dániel returned from his academic trip to Italy where he had been sent by the Transylvanian bishop.
#Origins of the book collector series
since Dániel bought a series of books for this cultural institution.
The connection between Imre Dániel and the future Batthyaneum Library is a very strong one. The present study is a continuation of a wider research that aims at rediscovering as much data as possible on the connection between the Transylvanian bishop Ignác Batthyány and his collaborator, Imre Dániel, whom the bishop appointed librarian of his library that was finally settled in Alba Carolina.