Ferdinand Columbus maintained a complex series of keyword indexes, alphabetical lists of authors and titles, numerical inventories, and book summaries to document his library, one of the largest collections of the sixteenth century. This talk explores these catalogues, including Columbus’s massive compendium of summaries, known as the Libro de los epítomes and recently rediscovered in the Arnamagnæan Institute’s archive in Copenhagen.
Seth Kimmel is associate professor of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University, and the author of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (U of Chicago P, 2015), which won the ACLA’s Harry Levin Prize for best first book.