The Librarian's Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain by Seth Kimmel
KIMMEL'S INTERDISCIPLINARY exploration of what he terms "library culture," "the bibliographic methods, metaphors of assemblage and compilation, and forms of learned sociability that characterized the processes of collection and conservation occurring in libraries" (4). Considering a broad corpus of manuscript and printed catalogs, published histories, geographic reference works, maps, dictionaries, paintings, and sculptures, mainly associated either with the personal library of Christopher Columbus's son, Hernando Colón (1488–1539), or Philip II's ambitious royal library at San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Kimmel argues that this bibliographic work had sweeping epistemological and cosmographic ambitions. He identifies and studies a group of protagonists from several generations of scholars, including cosmographer Hernando Colón, Hebraist Benito Arias Montano (1527–1598), royal chronicler Juan Páez de Castro (1510–1570), cosmographer-chronicler Juan López de Velasco (1530–1598), and Ambrosio de Morales (1513–1591), who participated in the bibliographic and cosmographic project of sixteenth-century imperial Spain. Kimmel explains how by acquiring, cataloging, and organizing a wide corpus of materials, these bibliographic protagonists sought to create and make comprehensible universal knowledge in a shifting and expanding world.
Chapter 1, "Hernando Colón's Cosmography," focuses on the bibliographer and the relationship between his cosmographic work and his agenda as a serious private collector to amass a universal library, represented through a recently discovered catalog of the collection, the Libro de los epítomes. The chapter establishes Colón's library, now dispersed, as a site of encounter and collaboration among intellectuals who would build on Colón's system of knowledge and inquiry both in Seville and subsequently in San Lorenzo, shaping the organization, interpretation, and understanding of information at the very heart of the early modern Spanish empire.
Chapter 2, "Routes of Antiquarianism: From Seville to San Lorenzo," continues to engage with Colón's bibliographic project, shifting to his organizational "strategies of cross-referencing and tagging" (10), which Kimmel argues influenced the later bibliographic project at the Escorial that [End Page 145] the remainder of the book investigates. This was in part due to the access to his library that Colón gave to some of the same experts in antiquarianism and philology who would go on to populate and help expand the holdings in Philip's royal library in San Lorenzo during the second half of the sixteenth century.
Chapter 3, "A Universal Library for Philip II: Juan Páez de Castro and the Escorial's Order of Knowledge," follows the threads of Colón's cosmographic and bibliographic influence on the subsequent generation as it considers Páez de Castro's efforts to marshal cosmographic data in his undertaking to "craft … history at a moment when the bounds of universality were as dynamic as the frontiers of Spain's empire, whose management moreover produced a previously unimaginable quantity of documents relevant to the historian's work" (69).
Chapter 4, "Biblioteca and Biblia: Benito Arias Montano's Logics of Place," focuses on Arias Montano's work as the Escorial librarian and editor of Philip II's Biblia Regia. Kimmel is particularly interested in the conceptual coincidences he sees in Arias Montano's theorization of locations and histories of physical places, toponomies, and commonplaces in the practice of the art of memory. Departing from a piece of correspondence from Arias Montano to Philip II in which he substitutes the word "Biblia" for "biblioteca," Kimmel argues that this lexical mix-up reveals the extent to which the publication of an imperially authoritative Bible and the formation and organization of a royal library were part of the same project for Arias Montano. Moreover, Arias Montano's fixation on geography and toponymy closely links the authority of that bibliographic and biblical project to sacred geographies, verified through his own careful scholarship of the Holy Lands and scripture, and loci, rhetorically memorable commonplaces. These sacred geographies are reflected in the very spatial organization and decoration of the librarian's emerging place of work: the library at the Escorial.
Chapter 5, "This Holy Land: Semitic Philology and Peninsular Toponymy," explores how Arias Montano marshaled the tools of Semitic philology and biblical antiquarianism in his commitment to establishing Philip II as a sixteenth-century King Solomon and portraying the Escorial as a latter-day Jerusalem. Through readings of Arias Montano's work in natural history and antiquarianism, as well as Sebastián de Covarrubias's philological and lexicographical project in Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española, Kimmel shows how Arias Montano's toponymic work "codified and popularized the sense that the Iberian Peninsula was an allegorical holy land" (124).
In Chapter 6, "Spanish Orientalism and Saʿadī Cultures of the Catalog," Kimmel traces a final act of imperial bibliography, the stolen library of Saʿdī monarch Muley Zidān (d. 1627). Driven from Marrakesh by enemies in 1614, Aḥmad al-Manṣūr's son and successor Muley Zidān sent his belongings, including the library, in part by sea to Safi and Agadir. The captain charged with transporting them encountered a Spanish naval fleet, which seized his cargo. The library, at first undervalued by the admiral of the Spanish fleet, made its way through the hands of a Basque courtier before Philip III eventually incorporated it into the library at the Escorial. This library expanded the Arabic holdings of the Escorial, despite the best efforts of [End Page 146] Moroccan diplomats to recover these books well into the seventeenth century. Specifically, Kimmel explores how fahāris, or catalogs of works, and ijāzāt, or pedagogical certificates themselves often collected in catalogs, built "metaphorical 'maps' of knowledge" that served as "instruments of imperial apology" (148). Just as Philip II's imperial image was built up through the bibliographic and cosmographic projects of the preceding chapters, so too were Aḥmad al-Manṣūr's caliphal claims of authority supported through similar bibliographic endeavors, now accessible and comprehensible to peninsular Arabists through the Saʿdī collection at the Escorial.
The depth of archival research undergirding the book's argument is extraordinary, as it reveals cosmographic and bibliographic networks that stretched beyond the Iberian Peninsula to the Netherlands, Rome, Venice, and Saʿdī Morocco and shaped not just knowledge of the early modern Spanish empire and scholarly activity within it, but also royal claims to legitimacy and hegemony and the understanding of that empire itself. While Kimmel studies such well-known texts as Covarrubias's Tesoro, much of his argument is compellingly constructed from deep and knowledgeable readings of previously neglected sources in Spanish, Latin, and Arabic such as library catalogs, correspondence among cosmographers, bibliographers, and royal secretaries, and miscellanies documenting scholars' efforts to construct universal knowledge. One of the fascinating implications for the book's arguments, which Kimmel occasionally points to but does not flesh out, which are based on the organizing of massive quantities of disparate kinds of information toward a tight and cogent worldview, is considering how the technologies for organizing the overwhelming wealth of information available in the twenty-first century are currently shaping knowledge itself.
In a book focused on large scale bibliographic culture, there are some surprising lacunae in Kimmel's citations. To be sure, all scholars have their own touchstones for the topics they study and want to maintain the "sovereignty of our own stories," to quote Katherine McKittrick's discussion of politics of citation practices (Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke UP, 2021, p. 15). Yet, it was disappointing to discover some notable absences in Kimmel's discussion of three particular areas: the epistemological challenges of empire, the relationship between Spain and the Holy Lands, and the role of deixis in the writing of empire (respectively, the focus of chapters 3, 5, and 6). For the importance of Jerusalem in early modern Spain, I would point to a trio of studies by Chad Leahy: "Re-Placing the Holy Land in Lope de Vega's Isidro: Poema castellano (1599)" (Bulletin of Spanish Studies, vol. 94, no. 9, 2017, pp. 1475–1502); "'That Kingdom Is Mine': On Spain's Early Modern Polemics of Possession over Jerusalem, circa 1605" (Quidditas: The Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association, vol. 41, 2020, pp. 96–133); and "Making the Case for Spain's Possession of Jerusalem: Diego de Valdés's De dignitate regnum regnorumque Hispaniae" (Translat Library, vol. 2, no. 2, 2020, pp. 1–27). On deixis and early modern empire, readers should be aware of Heather Dubrow's remarkable book Deixis in Early Modern English Lyric: Unsettling Spatial Anchors Like "Here," "This," "Come" (Palgrave, 2015). Questions of deixis and empire were also explored by Richard Helgerson in A Sonnet from Carthage: Garcilaso de la Vega and the New Poetry of Sixteenth-Century [End Page 147] Europe) (U of Pennsylvania P, 2007). This reviewer has additionally written about deixis in A Grammar of the Corpse: Necroepistemology in the Early Modern Mediterranean (Fordham UP, 2023), as well as Saʿdī knowledge production in "Body as Text/Text as Body: Embodied Knowledge Transmission in Sixteenth Century Morocco" (Medieval Encounters, vol. 29, 2023, pp. 315–39). Especially in the final two chapters, Kimmel's arguments would have been enriched by mobilizing this scholarship. Moreover, this was a missed opportunity to engage with and hence boost the visibility of contemporary and junior scholars in the field. To again quote McKittrick, "Perhaps the function of communication, referencing, citation, is not to master knowing and centralizing our knowingness, but to share how we know" (17, emphasis in original). [End Page 148]
