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

By Seth Kimmel

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226854477
• ISBN13: 9780226854472
• Release Date: October 2026
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.74 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"