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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tzarevitch" data-source="post: 400002" data-attributes="member: 1792">As I recall in medieval Europe, a handful of universities (which were almost always affiliated with the church) and the church itself  tended to have the vast majority of the existing books or manuscripts. Wealthy private collectors (nobles) held the rest. As several people have pointed out, libraries didn't exist as they do now.  Until the printing press (and mass production) arrived, "books" were horribly expensive and rare because they were hand-copied and hand illuminated. Even then, books remained rare because there weren't enough people who could read them. Before mass literacy arrived the few existing manuscripte were held in private collections by the church or wealthy nobles. I remember reading a book (I can't remember it's name) where a medieval noble was particularly proud of his impressive collection of 20 books (which was an impressive collection in those days.) As others have pointed out, things change if you go east into the Islamic world and to parts of Asia (China in particular) where you have strong central governments that value learning and record keeping and are stable enough to act as patrons of literacy and knowledge. The Catholic Church was the closest Europe could get to this until the Renaissance. Back to your original question though.  Researching information in 1000AD would probably involve getting permission from 3-4 vealthy nobles to peruse their private collections. If you are in a university town or a town worthy of a cathedral or a monastery, you'd have the added option of prevailing on the church (owned the universities and the monasteries) for access to it's collections. You could only get access to a collection if someone of note could vouch for you or if the owner knew you and trusted you around his precious books. This can give the PCs plenty of opportunity for roleplaying as they have to not only figure a way to convince a noble or the bishop to allow them access to his precious manuscript collection, but they also have to find which of perhaps a dozen individual collections scattered over a significant geographical area has the particular manuscript that they need. TzarevitchP.S. I will join others in highly recommending Umberto Ecco's, "The Name of the Rose". The movie is OK, the book is MUCH better. There is also a lineart map of the monastery and the library inside the book.</blockquote>

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