The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library presents
Matilde Malaspina, Sapienza Università di Roma and Seth Kimmel, Columbia University:
“Hernándo Colón and the Total Library.”
This lecture brings together scholars who will present new perspectives on the monumental 2019 discovery of the long-lost manuscript copy of Hernando Colón’s 16th-century Libro de los epitomes in the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection at the University of Copenhagen. The manuscript is just one of various bibliographic tools that humanist collector Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, devised to manage his more than 15,000-volume book collection, one he hoped would come to be a “total library” including every book ever written in every language. Malaspina is the principal investigator of the European Research Council Grant COLIBRI: Hernando Colón’s Universal Library: European Culture and Intellectual Production at the Dawn of the Global World . Kimmel has recently published a landmark study of the material history of early modern libraries, The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain, that connects the desire of humanist collectors such as Colón to codify the world through early bibliographic cataloguing to the colonial project.