The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain

A history of early modern libraries and the imperial desire for total knowledge—now in paperback.

Medieval scholars imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but as novel early modern ways of managing information facilitated empire in both the New and Old Worlds, the world became a projection of the library. In The Librarian's Atlas, Seth Kimmel offers a sweeping material history of how the desire to catalog books coincided in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the aspiration to control territory. Through a careful study of library culture in Spain and Morocco—close readings of catalogs, marginalia, indexes, commentaries, and maps—Kimmel reveals how the booklover's dream of a comprehensive and well-organized library shaped an expanded sense of the world itself.

© 2024 The University of Chicago Press (E-bog): 9780226833187

Udgivelsesdato

E-bog: 6. maj 2024