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

Kimmel, Seth

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226854477 ISBN 13: 9780226854472

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2026

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226854477
• ISBN 13: 9780226854472
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272