Albert Derolez

A photograph of Albert Derolez consulting the Liber Floridus in the Rare Books Reading Room of Ghent University Library, 2014

Albert Derolez (8 August 1934 – 11 July 2026) was a Belgian librarian and medievalist, particularly known as an expert on the 12th-century encyclopaedia Liber Floridus.

Life and career

From 1962 Derolez was employed by Ghent University Library, where he catalogued and inventorised the medieval manuscripts. He completed a doctorate in 1970 with a thesis on the Liber Floridus, and in subsequent decades was recognised as the leading expert on that text.[1]

While continuing to work as a librarian in Ghent, Derolez also lectured on codicology and palaeography at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Université Libre de Bruxelles, as well as being a guest lecturer at UC Berkeley and the Rare Book School, where he held the Kenneth and Shirley Rendell Chair in Manuscript Studies.[2] He was a consultant on the digital cataloguing of the manuscripts in the Beinecke Library at Yale University.[1]

In 2018 a Festschrift was published in his honour with the title Librorum studiosus: Miscellanea palaeographica et codicologica Albert Derolez dicata, edited by Lucien Reynhout and Benjamin Victor. He died on 11 July 2026, at the age of 91.[1]

Works

Derolez had over 400 publications to his name.[3] Among them are:

  • Lamberti S. Audomari Canonici Liber Floridus: Codex Autographus Bibliothecae Universitatis Gandavensis, 1968
  • The Library of Raphael de Marcatellis, Abbot of St. Bavon's, Ghent, 1437-1508, 1979
  • Guibert of Gembloux, Epistolae, 1988–1989
  • with C. Coppens and H. Heymans, Codex Eyckensis: An Insular Gospel Book from the Abbey of Aldeneik, 1994
  • The Autograph Manuscript of the Liber Floridus: A Key to the Encyclopedia of Lambert of Saint-Omer, 1998
  • "The Manuscript Transmission of Hildegard of Bingen's Writings", in Hildegard of Bingen: The Context of her Thought and Art, edited by Charles Burnett and Peter Dronke, 1998
  • The Palaeography of Gothic Manuscript Books from the Twelfth to the Early Sixteenth Century, 2003[4]
  • ""The Script Reform of Petrarch: An Illusion?" in Music and Medieval Manuscripts: Paleography and Performance, edited by John Haines and Randall Rosenfeld, 2006
  • The Making and Meaning of the Liber Floridus: A Study of the Original Manuscript, Ghent University Library, MS 92, 2014[5]
  • with Hendrik Defoort and Frank Vanlangenhove, Medieval Manuscripts: Ghent University Library, 2017
  • Liber Floridus: De oudste geïllustreerde encyclopedie, 2025[6]

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Albert Derolez (1934-2026): een leven gewijd aan middeleeuwse handschriften". Ghent University Library. 2026.
  2. ↑ "Albert Derolez". Rare Book School.
  3. ↑ "The Writings of Albert Derolez", in Archaeology of the Manuscript Book in the Italian Renaissance, 2018, pp. 10-63
  4. ↑ Reviewed by Consuelo W. Dutschke in Speculum, 81/1 (2006), pp. 171-172.
  5. ↑ Reviewed by Scott G. Bruce in Mediaevistik, 29 (2016), pp. 399-400; by Nathalie Bouloux in Médiévales, 77 (2019), pp. 188-192.
  6. ↑ Bart Moerman (4 April 2025). "91-jarige prof laat ons meelezen met zijn levenslange passie, het Liber Floridus". Het Nieuwsblad.
This page is issued from Wikipedia. The text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 unless otherwise noted. Additional terms may apply for the media files.