This website attempts to reconstruct the famous library of Tongerlo Abbey before its temporary closure in 1796, based on old catalogues and archival documents.
- Phase one is to identify the books that definitely belonged to Tongerlo Abbey, according to the list of those that have been bought by the National Library of The Netherlands in 1828, and are still available over there. This list is kept in the National Library (KW 77 K 41) and contains about 5000 short book descriptions.
- Phase two will be to match those books with the library catalogues that were drafted in Tongerlo Abbey in 1625 and 1707. These catalogues are available in the archives of Tongerlo Abbey (AAT, V, 323 and AAT, V, 312).
- Phase three will be to match the whole list with the books sections of the inventories of parsonages the Tongerlo Abbey parish priests were obliged to draft each year. Those inventories are available in the archives of Tongerlo Abbey (AAT, IV, 134-150). This could possibly lead to books that were somehow not described in the above-mentioned catalogues, as well as to more insight into what the parish priests of Tongerlo Abbey read when they served the parishes in Brabant in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Status of the work in progress:
At the moment - phase one - the website has the following record numbers:
- Authors: 211
- Books: 441
- Publishers: 270
More information:
For more information on the library of Tongerlo Abbey and in particular the purchase of part of its books by the National library of The Netherlands in 1828:
- Leendert Brummel, "De boeken van Tongerloo in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek te 's-Gravenhage", in: Het Boek, 24(1936-1937), 193-210.
- Gerard van Thienen, "Incunabula from the abbey at Tongerlo. The provenance of part of the collection of incunables in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek", in: Hellinga Festschrift, Amsterdam, 1980, 481-492.
- Pierre Delsaerdt, "De verzegelde kisten van de Vrouwe Adriana. De abdijbibliotheek van Tongerlo en de patrimonialisering van het boek in het Verenigd Koninkrijk der Nederlanden", in: Jaarboek voor Nederlandse boekgeschiedenis, 25(2018), 129-149.
For more information on the books sections of the inventories of parsonages of the Tongerlo Abbey parish priests and in particular an analysis of the content of 21 of such inventories of four Tongerlo Abbey parish priests that served the parish Tilburg in the first half of the seventeenth century, see my master's thesis:
- Wim van Dongen, De bibliotheek van vier Tilburgse pastoors uit de eerste helft van de zeventiende eeuw. Een bijdrage tot de studie van het boekenbezit en boekengebruik bij de Norbertijnen van de Abdij Tongerlo, Tilburg, 1988 (unpublished, but I will make this study online available soon).