| Project Detail |
Returning Renaissance library books
In the early 16th century, Hernando Colón (1488-1539) strove to establish a Universal Library in Seville. It was not only a repository of printed tomes, but also a myriad of more ephemeral works like pamphlets and almanacs, making it an unparalleled historical resource. The collection was largely dispersed following Colóns death, however, much of it sold off by antiquarian booksellers. The EU-funded FILOL project will try to locate this missing material, making it accessible in the Hernando Colóns Book of Books database. FILOL will cross-reference all of the librarys original catalogues and employ a novel research method involving the bibliographic tools used by the antiquarian book market itself, facilitating the past and present tracking of early printed books and ephemera.
The overarching aim of the FILOL project is to track down for the first time the dispersed books from Hernando Colón’s “Universal Library”. In the early 16th century, Hernando Colón (1488-1539) established in Seville the first documentation centre in the Western world, in which he aimed to gather copies of “every book on every subject in every language”. Almost the entirety of his collection was comprised of printed books. Unlike other Renaissance intellectuals, Colón collected not only fine editions but also the products of popular publishing, such as pamphlets, almanacs and other ephemera. Colón’s library was, therefore, the first official repository of the written products of what was considered universal culture, destined in most cases to disappear precisely because of their physical fragility. To manage the 15,000 books he collected, Colón designed a revolutionary system of cross-referenced catalogues relating to the authors, subjects, extracts and summaries of his volumes. After Colón’s death, most of his books were dispersed, and today only about 4,000 volumes from his original collection survive in the Biblioteca Colombina in Seville. In addition to extensive losses immediately following Colón’s death, books continued to go missing from the BC into the late 19th century, frequently winding up on the antiquarian book market. The FILOL project will attempt to describe and locate a significant portion of the Universal Library’s dispersed volumes, making them available in a catalogue hosted in the open-access database Book of Books, developed by the team of the UCPH project “Hernando Colón’s Book of Books”. This will be accomplished through a cross-reference examination of the complete set of Colón’s library catalogues and an innovative research methodology focused on the analysis of the antiquarian book market’s bibliographic tools to track the mobility of early printed books in the modern and contemporary age. |
