The Librarian's Atlas - Seth Kimmel

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Résumé :
A history of early modern libraries and the imperial desire for total knowledge.

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....

Biographie:
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....

Sommaire:

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.