The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain by Seth Kimmel (review)

Kimmel’s interdisciplinary exploration of what he terms “library culture,” “the bibliographic methods, metaphors of assemblage and compilation, and forms of learned sociability that characterized the processes of collection and conservation occurring in libraries” (4). Considering a broad corpus of manuscript and printed catalogs, published histories, geographic reference works, maps, dictionaries, paintings, and sculptures, mainly associated either with the personal library of Christopher Columbus’s son, Hernando Colón (1488–1539), or Philip II’s ambitious royal library at San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Kimmel argues that this bibliographic work had sweeping epistemological and cosmographic ambitions. He identifies and studies a group of protagonists from several generations of scholars, including cosmographer Hernando Colón, Hebraist Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598), royal chronicler Juan Páez de Castro (1510–1570), cosmographer-chronicler Juan López de Velasco (1530–1598), and Ambrosio de Morales (1513–1591), who participated in the bibliographic and cosmographic project of sixteenth-century imperial Spain. Kimmel explains how by acquiring, cataloging, and organizing a wide corpus of materials, these bibliographic protagonists sought to create and make comprehensible universal knowledge in a shifting and expanding world. Chapter