The Practices of Erudition According to Morhof

Abstract

In approaching this topic, I have felt as if "I am entering an ocean where it is hard to find a port, and where the danger of shipwreck from rocks and sandbanks is great"i . I have come back from my venture with a trawl of quotations and observations particularly from the liber bibliothecarius, which hardly exhaust or provide a systematic account of the practices of erudition according to Morhof--I will not address excerpting, learned conversation and collegiality, or rhetoric among other possible topics. I have focused instead on two aspects of Morhof's conception of erudition, which highlight a tension in his thought between, on the one hand, his optimistic call for a collaborative program of empirical research into books (his historia literario-libraria, to use his biographer Moeller's phrase), and, on the other hand, a strand of pessimism stemming from a traditional religious sensibility (distinct from the theological) which reminds him of the limits of human knowledge.