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New Books Network Podcast: „The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain“

Im New Books Net­work Pod­cast in der Rei­he „New Books in Ear­ly Mod­ern His­to­ry“ sprach Seth Kim­mel im Okto­ber 2024 über seine Forschung zu einem beson­deren Aspekt der Bib­lio­theks­geschichte:

In The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowl­edge in Ear­ly Mod­ern Spain (U Chica­go Press, 2024) 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.

Sollte das Buch für Ihr Studi­um oder Ihre Lehre und Forschung inter­es­sant sein, schick­en Sie uns gerne einen Anschaf­fungsvorschlag!

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