Name: Hernándo Colón and the Total Library
Start: 2026-02-04T16:00:00-05:00
End: 2026-02-04T18:00:00-05:00
Location: 121 Wall St, New Haven, CT, United States, Connecticut 06511

$Hern\u00e1ndo Col\u00f3n and the Total Library$

This lecture brings together scholars Matilde Malaspina (University of Copenhagen) and Seth Kimmel (Columbia University), who will present new perspectives on the monumental 2019 discovery of the long-lost manuscript copy of Hernando Colón’s 16th-century Libro de los epitomes in the Arnamagnæan Manuscript Collection at the University of Copenhagen.
The manuscript is just one of various bibliographic tools that humanist collector Colón, son of Christopher Columbus, devised to manage his more than 15,000-volume book collection, one he hoped would come to be a “total library” including every book ever written in every language.
Malaspina is one of the researchers working on the EU-funded “Book of Books” project to edit, digitize, and publish a translation of the manuscript (itself a reference guide Colón prepared with summaries of the books in his collection). Kimmel has recently published a landmark study of the material history of early modern libraries, The Librarian’s Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain, that connects the desire of humanist collectors such as Colón to codify the world through early bibliographic cataloguing to the colonial project.