In contrast to the official image of the library, its inner story unfolded more in silence, even though it was presided by noteworthy men of its time. In 1745, Gerard van Swieten, known as Maria Theresa’s personal physician and reformer of medical education, was called to Vienna as the court library’s new prefect.
In the Netherlands, the Dutchman and "Little Republican", as he described himself, had not only become acquainted with and learnt to appreciate a state-of-the-art publishing industry, but also the modern academic library system of Leiden. Via booksellers in Paris, Venice, and Leiden, he organised the purchase of recent scientific literature from Western European countries for the court library, thus adding a key element of a modern library to its collection activities: the acquisition of the latest scientific writings. Gerard van Swieten was perfectly familiar with them, since as president of the book censorship commission he read and commented upon numerous academic works himself, most of which dealt with the natural sciences, but they also included works by the French Enlighteners. For instance, the library owns a codex in which Gerard van Swieten comments upon the books censored by him using a cryptographic code:
"A useful book I bought for the library", "doesn’t contain anything bad", "quite a useful book", "found nothing bad, but nothing useful either" are positive comments that can be found, but there are others, too: "shameless, will be banned", "contains a lot of dangerous things, will be banned"
Our website uses cookies: in addition to those that are technically necessary for the functionality of our website and therefore cannot be rejected, we also use those whose purpose is to analyse website accesses, as well as those set by third-party providers such as Youtube and Google. With your consent to analysis and third-party cookies, data is processed both by us and by third-party providers, some of which are based in third countries (e.g. the USA). You can find more information about the tools and the partner:s in our data protection declaration. If you wish, you can adjust your cookie settings individually at any time via the link in the footer.
These cookies are necessary for the basic functions of the website. You can block or delete them in your browser settings, but then there is a risk that some parts of the website will not function properly.
If you activate Matomo, we can analyse your use of our website in order to adapt and further improve our services. The following cookies may be set:
If you activate Youtube, videos from this provider will be displayed on our website. The following cookies may be set:
If you activate Google Maps, maps from this provider will be displayed on our website. The following cookies may be set: