The Destroyed Libraries of Louvain (2012)

https://www.libraryhistorybuff.com/louvain.htm

by benbreen • 3 years ago

25 11 3 years ago

rubenv2• 3 years ago

Hey, that's where I live!

Terrible history around our libraries. Happy it got rebuilt though. You can visit the Ladeuze tower, has quite a nice view of the city.

3abiton• 3 years ago

I thought that was Leuven.

rubenv2• 3 years ago

Ladeuze is the name of the library (and square where it's located).

Leuven indeed.

gpcr19492• 3 years ago

Interesting history, but people in Leuven call this city Leuven and not Louvain. No need to use the french term in a flemish city where almost no one speaks french as their first language. In fact, french language was the subject of some amount of political struggle in the 1960s, resulting in the founding of the french speaking university in "Louvain-la-Neuve", a planned city that was built in (french speaking) Wallonia for this purpose. You can read more about the politically important language discussion that occured in the 1960s here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split_of_the_Catholic_Universi...

VK538FY3• 3 years ago

Don't the English write Bâle instead of Basel sometimes? (An officially germaophone city.) It can be that English retains the French writing. Nothing wring with that.

brnt2• 3 years ago

I think we learned from Kyiv that we should tape some care not to let third parties write some place's history for them.

French imperialism used to be quite similar, after all.

gpcr19492• 3 years ago

Writing Basel as Bâle would be silly and non-standard too, yes. Maybe "wrong" is too strong of a classification. But for example, I wouldn't immediately recognize it as Basel in a headline. FWIW Leuven refers to itself in English as Leuven on their own website: https://www.leuven.be/en

Also somewhat interesting to me is that for some reason people think Belgium is mainly a French speaking country, but in fact there are actually more Dutch speakers than French speakers (56% vs 38% native speakers according to Eurostat in 2015) - I have the sense referring to Flemish cities by their French name reflects that

tverbeure• 3 years ago

This is as good an opportunity as any to mention how the library books were divided when the university was split into a Flemish and the newly created Walloon university:

“But the majority of works were just divided by shelfmark: Odds stayed in Leuven, evens left for Louvain-la-Neuve.”

(https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/when-was-the-leuven-li...)

brnt2• 3 years ago

A very Belgian solution! Would be interesting if one half would contain material of higher quality than the other. Maybe odd-lettered people created the more important works?

The Destroyed Libraries of Louvain (2012)

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