PhD defence H.M.T. (Marc) Riese

Below is a brief summary of the dissertation:

Two theses are defended. The first addresses the fact that the most important primary source related to Spinoza’s library, the notarized estate inventory of 1677, presents numerous uncertainty issues. Until now these have not been addressed explicitly, comprehensively and systematically when analysing the inventory. This has led to errors and occasional cases of false consensus. Multiple scholars have implicitly attributed more authority to the catalogues of the Spinozahuis Society than they merit. They do not offer a reliable basis for analysing Spinoza’s library. I defend the thesis that, by applying a probabilistic method to address uncertainty issues systematically, we can derive a more comprehensive, more accurate, and more transparent appraisal of which editions Spinoza did own, likely owned, or possibly owned, than has been achieved in earlier studies.
The second thesis addresses the fact that valuable insights can be gained by analysing the intellectual content of the library of a historic figure, as well as by comparing those results with the results of similar analyses of the libraries of contemporaries. Typical approaches taken by experts for this task tend to be partially impressionistic. I defend the thesis that the broad and yet fine-grained categorisation of all human knowledge made by Gisbertus Voetius (1589-1676) in his Exercitia et Bibliotheca, Studiosi Theologiæ (1st edition Utrecht: 1644. 2nd edition Utrecht: 1651),  including extensive references to representative works, offers an outstanding single point of reference for evaluating and comparing the intellectual content of scholarly libraries acquired up to the mid-17th century. The proposed approach helps to identify, make transparent, and compare the unique intellectual profiles of libraries more reliably. The approach takes multi-theme works into account and helps to address potential risks of semi-impressionistic analyses, such as incompleteness, unbalanced presentation, inconsistency, subjectivity, and anachronistic or ahistorical statements. I present the results of having applied this approach to evaluate and compare the libraries of Spinoza (1632-1677), Johannes Koerbagh (1634-1672), and Henry Oldenburg (1618-1677), whose periods of book acquisitions overlap closely into the mid- to late 17th century. The dissertation is divided into Part One and Part Two, corresponding to these two theses. The first part provides some of the foundations for the second part.