The Fire at Louvain

Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World

In the late-summer of 1914, a city burns and its university library with it. Unusually for this podcast, the story takes us into WWI, but there are medieval connections to the story of Louvain (Leuven) and what happened when the German army came to town.

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Sources:

• Bazydlo, Angela. “Manuscript lost in WWI fire turns up in Clark Archives.” https://clarknow.clarku.edu/2021/08/30/manuscript-lost-in-wwi-fire-turns-up-in-clark-archives/
• Battles, Matthew. Library: An Unquiet History. W. W. Norton & Company, 2011.
• Battles, Matthew. “Knowledge on Fire.” The American Scholar 72, no. 3 (2003): 35–51.
• Bouwman, André. “Book burning in Louvain, 1914.” https://www.leidenspecialcollectionsblog.nl/articles/book-burning-in-louvain-1914
• Delannoy, Paul. “The Library at the University of Louvain,” The Nineteenth Century, Vol. LXXVII - No. 59, p. 1061 May 1915.
• Derez, Mark. “The Flames of Louvain: a Library as a Cultural Icon and a Political Vehicle,” What do we lose when we lose a library? Proceedings of the conference held at the KU Leuven 9-11 September 2015.
• Gusejnova, Dina. “Librarians as Agents of German Foreign Policy and the Cultural Consequences of the First World War.” The Historical Journal 66, no. 4 (2023): 864–86.
• Kipling, Rudyard. “In Aid of Recruiting.” https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/readers-guide/rg_speeches_29.htm
• Kramer, Alan. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford University Press, 2008.
• Matin, A. Michael. “‘The Hun is at the Gate!’: Historicizing Kipling's Militaristic Rhetoric, From the Imperial Periphery to the National Center: Part Two: The French, Russian, and German Threats to Great Britain.” Studies in the Novel 31, no. 4 (1999): 432–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/29533357.
• Ovenden, Richard. Burning the Books. Harvard University Press, 2020.
• Ovenden, Richard. “One of Europe’s Great Libraries Didn’t Stand a Chance… In Either of the World Wars.” https://lithub.com/one-of-europes-great-libraries-didnt-stand-a-chance-in-either-of-the-world-wars/

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