The Librarian's Atlas

""Kimmel offers a different and stimulating perspective of early modern libraries as spaces of lively bibliographic and editorial activity. In this book, libraries are not static repositories of knowledge for individual learning pursuits, but rather evolving loci that gather intellectual communities, nurture cultural and linguistic exchanges, and develop novel forms of collection and conservation. Libraries are, in one of the book’s boldest claims, spaces that shape how the Spanish Empire perceives, constructs, and approaches the world."" * Modern Philology * “The Librarian’s Atlas is an early modern booklover’s dream. It invites the reader to peer over the shoulder of the creative act of world-making that took place in early modern Spanish libraries. As Kimmel masterfully shows, these libraries were not passive book repositories but vibrant and intellectually stimulating sites of knowledge creation. Their contents and organization were also political projects essential to the formation of a modern understanding of the world."" -- María M. Portuondo, Johns Hopkins University “If every book is a world in itself, then a library is a collection of worlds that invites practices of mastery to keep readers afloat in an ocean of paper. Librarians, scholars, translators, and booksellers must define coordinates and draw maps to organize such an atlas. Focusing on the Escorial’s foundation in San Lorenzo and unfolding metaphors around the concept of the bibliotheca, Kimmel offers a fascinating archaeology of intellectual technologies in early modern Europe.” -- Christian Jacob, École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) “Kimmel’s brilliant book recovers nothing less than the relationship between the library and the world at a time of unprecedented intellectual and political ambition. They came together, above all, in the complex called the Escorial, created by King Philip II and his successors outside Madrid, and Kimmel offers our richest account to date of its origins, evolutions, and afterlives.” -- Bill Sherman, Warburg Institute