Preserving the World's Rarest BooksWhose Book is it Anyway? Post-Mortem Inventories as Sources for Book History

How do we know what books people read and owned hundreds of years ago? Sometimes this is visible in the books themselves through inscriptions, marginalia and book plates, but what if the books no longer survive? One possible source is the post-mortem inventory. These inventories made after an individual’s death for various reasons describe their goods and occasionally their books. They can tell us about the books that a famous person, such as Isaac Newton, owned or about the books of less-well-known, but still fairly privileged, individuals like the clergy, legal professionals and widows that I have studied in Navarre, Spain. In conjunction with contextual and biographical information, post-mortem book inventories provide further insights into the reading public at a particular time in history.

Post-mortem inventories contain anything valuable enough to merit recording, and in the case of books, this means some are described in post-mortem inventories while others are not. On the one hand, more valuable professional books, books in larger formats, and books in good condition are generally listed in inventories. On the other hand, some books are in such poor condition that they are considered not worth recording, and ephemera in private libraries rarely receives even passing mention.

When items are mentioned in inventories, the levels of description can vary widely, often for reasons of value. Beginning at the lower extreme of description in María de Ceniceros’ (d. 1644) inventory, an entry for books kept in a pine chest with linens, a knife, and yarn simply reads 'also, twenty-one books, small and large and medium in Spanish, all different works’ (‘Iten veynte y un libros pequeños y grandes y medianos de Romance, todos de diferentes tomos’). This is not very expressive, but it matches the level of description for her other household items, such as a gilt bronze alarm clock, by describing its more material qualities (size, number) versus intellectual content (author, title). The poor description might also be connected to value since a few more valuable books stored elsewhere in Ceniceros’ house have better descriptions, such as a book of hours with a gilt binding and gold clasps (‘unas oras de nuestra señora con sus manillas y cubiertas doradas’). The entry is still mostly physical description, but we get some inkling of the content. 

Many inventory entries have middling descriptions that usually contain author names, titles, and/or format (folio, quarto, etc.). This information allows for us to understand the book’s intellectual content and discern the right work or edition. Take for example a quarto’s entry in the inventory of Mariana Vicente de Echeverri, countess of Villalcázar and marchioness of Villarrubia (d. 1684): ‘novels of Doña Mariana de Saias’ (‘nobelas de Doña Mariana de Saias’). The author is the writer María de Zayas (1590-1661), but the title seems a little vague at first. However, using Iberian Books and limiting the search to all quartos printed before 1684 with the author as “Zayas” and title as “novelas,” we find that there are three extant editions or issues, all referring to the work Novelas amorosas y ejemplares. All three were printed in Madrid, so despite the inability to narrow to a specific edition, we now know geographic information about the book in addition to title, author, format, and language. There are still challenges to identifying correct authors and works, much less the right edition, however. The entry ‘another small book of the life and miracles of St. Catherine of Siena’ (‘otro libro pequeño de la vida y milagos de santa catalina de sena’) from the widow Ana de Sarasa’s (d. 1629) inventory escapes identification since it could be Raymond of Capua’s Vida y Milagros de santa Caterina de Sena or Isabel de Liaño’s Historia de la vida, muerte, y milagros de santa Catalina de Sena.

Finally, there are meticulous entries. The most detailed entries I have encountered in my research are in the inventory of Martín Jiménez (d. 1603), the relator (rapporteur) for the Corte Mayor of Navarre. While some entries have medium-level descriptions, a significant number are quite elaborate, giving information about the book’s material features, author, title, and imprint. One detailed entry reads: ‘a small vocabulario juris impression of Lyon in the year ‘61 [bound] in parchment’ (‘bocabulario juris pequeño ynpression de Leon del año de sesenta y una en pergamino’). Here we see information about size (small), binding (parchment, meaning a limp vellum binding), title (vocabulario juris), place of publication (Lyon), and year of publication (1561). Searching USTC with this information, one edition pops up: USTC 153208, Vocabularium utriusque juris by Antonio de Nebrija printed by Jacques Faure and published by the heirs of Jacques Giunta in Lyon in 1561. The USTC indicates that this is an octavo, which fits the physical description of the book as small. With this exacting description, it’s much easier to confidently associate an entry with a specific edition.

But why do some entries in Jiménez’s inventory receive these detailed descriptions and not others? Again, it appears partially a question of value. The entries containing publication information are about law books, meaning Jiménez used them regularly in his work as a relator. These are scholarly texts likely worth more in monetary or perceived intellectual value than the few volumes of literary, classical, and devotional texts that comprise the rest of his modest library.  

Ultimately, despite post-mortem inventories’ limitations and struggles associated with identifying the books in them, inventories are some of the most intriguing, valuable sources for understanding what books people had, which books had more value, and what people might have read in the early modern period. The books in every inventory help us understand their owners better, from rural priests to city widows to countesses.

Further Reading

Arkell, Tom, Nesta Evans, and Nigel Goose, When Death Do Us Part: Understanding and Interpreting the Probate Records of Early Modern England (Oxford: Leopard’s Head Press, 2000).

Bennassar, Bartolomé, ‘Los inventarios post-mortem y la historia de las mentalidades’, Actas del II coloquio de metologia histórica aplicada: la documentación notarial y la historia (Salamanca: Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, 1984), pp. 139–46.
Infantes, Victor, ‘Las ausencias en los inventarios de libros y de bibliotecas’, Bulletin Hispanique, 99.1 (1997), 281–92.
Pedraza Gracia, Manuel José, ‘Lector, lecturas, bibliotecas: el inventario como fuente para su investigación histórica’, Anales de documentación, 2 (1999), 137–58.

Walsby, Malcolm, and Natasha Constantinidou, eds., Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print (Leiden: Brill, 2013).