The Book Switch Theory

[ReneZ]

When I went to the Strahov library I knew it was there, but I am not sure if it was from an internet reference, or from a catalogue that Stolfi and I had seen together in a 1999 2000 visit.

In this context, here is a quote from Stolfiwritten to the old mailing list, just after our visit. The first three lines are mine.

> We came away from the meeting with Lubos Antonin with the clear
> message that, in the context of various recent exhibitions, no record
> related with Rudolph or Dee will have been overlooked.
   
Humm... having contemplated the Strahov monastery library, I am not so
sure of that. There must be zillions of books and documents about
Rudolph II scattered all over Europe, the vast majority still
unlisted and unindexed. Witness the two "unknown" letters by Kircher
that Lubos and Rene found in the Strahov index. Even with all the
interest generated by the Rudolph conferences, I doubt whether there
were enough man-hours available to go throug all that material.

On the other hand, the "easy" sources must have been combed quite
thoroughly. Therefore, any new information must be buried in
non-indexed, hard-to-get books, which cannot be reached by following
pointers from the standard ones.

Besides the Clementinum at Prague, the Jesuits had major
residences/schools at Olomouc, Brno, Cesky Krumlov, and two other
places in Bohemia which I could not identify ("Commotoniense" and
"Novodomense" in Latin). Each of these surely had its library and
archives; and any of them coud contain records about our heroes. Then
there were the monasteries of other orders (such as Strahov's), the
Karolinum libraries, state archives, libraries of royal palaces and
vassal castles, the Swedish libraries (where, it seems, most of
Rudolph's state archives are probably kept), the Vatican files, etc.
etc....

I would say that the search has barely begun...