The Librarian's Atlas - by Seth Kimmel (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In The Librarian's Atlas, Seth Kimmel explores the material history of libraries to challenge debates about the practice and politics of information management in early modern Europe. Ancient bibliographers and medieval scholastics, Kimmel reminds us, imagined the library as a microcosm of the world, but for early modern scholars, the world was likewise a projection of the library. This notion, at first glance, may seem counterintuitive, especially as reports from late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century explorers in the New World slowly refined-but also destabilized-the Old World's cosmographic and historical consensus. Yet the mapping and ethnographic projects commissioned by early modern rulers, like Spain's Charles V and Philip I, anxious to comprehend and inventory their far-flung territorial possessions in the Americas, nevertheless relied heavily on methods of information management honed in the library. Kimmel focuses on the period that marked the birth of both print and transatlantic exploration. Through close readings of a wide array of materials-library catalogues, marginal glosses, book indexes, biblical commentaries, dictionaries and thesauruses, natural histories, and maps-Kimmel shows how the book-lover's dream of total knowledge in an era of "too much information" helped to shape the early modern period's expanded sense of the world itself. The book should find its audience among scholars of early modern European history, specialists in the early modern cultures of the Mediterranean and Iberia, and a range of students interested in the history of the book and of maps"--

Book Synopsis

A history of early modern libraries and the imperial desire for total knowledge.

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.

Review Quotes

"An engaging and well-documented book, rich in analysis, that delves into a crucial aspect of the formation of early modern states: the collection of knowledge in a library that reflects the territorial wealth of the monarchy. Beautifully and ingeniously crafted, this book discusses a diverse gallery of figures (intellectuals, artists, travelers, and kings) with projects that interact with each other around the passion for books as
repositories of both knowledge and power."-- "Renaissance Quarterly"

"Libraries were all the rage in Renaissance Europe . . . [and] libraries still provide adventures, and of more kinds than ever. Kimmel eloquently evokes the European and American collections where he recreated the ways of early librarians, guided by their modern counterparts."-- "London Review of Books"

"A highly original study of book collectors in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain . . . The Librarian's Atlas offers an original perspective on the Spanish Golden Age and shows how our passion for exploring both sides of the horizon is accompanied by another, equally strong--that of mapping out our explorations and lending order to our curiosity." -- "Times Literary Supplement"

"Scholars interested in material culture and knowledge will find The Librarian's Atlas a valuable resource for their own research."-- "Libraries: Culture, History, and Society"

"Kimmel offers a different and stimulating perspective of early modern libraries as spaces of lively bibliographic and editorial activity. In this book, libraries are not static repositories of knowledge for individual learning pursuits, but rather evolving loci that gather intellectual communities, nurture cultural and linguistic exchanges, and develop novel forms of collection and conservation. Libraries are, in one of the book's boldest claims, spaces that shape how the Spanish Empire perceives, constructs, and approaches the world."-- "Modern Philology"

"The Librarian's Atlas is an early modern booklover's dream. It invites the reader to peer over the shoulder of the creative act of world-making that took place in early modern Spanish libraries. As Kimmel masterfully shows, these libraries were not passive book repositories but vibrant and intellectually stimulating sites of knowledge creation. Their contents and organization were also political projects essential to the formation of a modern understanding of the world."--María M. Portuondo, Johns Hopkins University

"If every book is a world in itself, then a library is a collection of worlds that invites practices of mastery to keep readers afloat in an ocean of paper. Librarians, scholars, translators, and booksellers must define coordinates and draw maps to organize such an atlas. Focusing on the Escorial's foundation in San Lorenzo and unfolding metaphors around the concept of the bibliotheca, Kimmel offers a fascinating archaeology of intellectual technologies in early modern Europe."--Christian Jacob, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS)

"Kimmel's brilliant book recovers nothing less than the relationship between the library and the world at a time of unprecedented intellectual and political ambition. They came together, above all, in the complex called the Escorial, created by King Philip II and his successors outside Madrid, and Kimmel offers our richest account to date of its origins, evolutions, and afterlives."--Bill Sherman, Warburg Institute

About the Author

Seth Kimmel is associate professor of Latin American and Iberian cultures at Columbia University. He is the author of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain, also published by the University of Chicago Press.