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

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 aspirat...