Bibliography and Cartography in the Early Modern Iberian World

Seth Kimmel is Assistant Professor at the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at the Columbia University. He earned his B.A. in Comparative Literature and Religion at Columbia and his Ph.D. from the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 2010. Before joining Columbia’s Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures in 2012, Seth spent two years as a member of Stanford University’s Mellon Fellowship of Scholars in the Humanities. His first book Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is an intellectual history of New Christian assimilation in the sixteenth century.

Seth Kimmel will present his second book project on the relationship between cartography and bibliography in the early modern period. Provisionally entitled, Envisioning Universalism, the book takes as a point of departure the life and library of Ferdinand Columbus (Christopher's illegitimate second son, who was also known by the Spanish name Hernando Colón). The library is seen as a tool and metaphor for memory in the sixteenth century, when technologies of print and shifting conventions of both collection and cartography made it possible to dream anew of universal knowledge, even as the explosion of texts and territories to be catalogued raised nagging doubts about the viability of actually knowing it all. Drawing the history of science and the history of the book into dialogue with each other and with scholarship in early modern cultural studies, his argument is that what we now call library and information science grew not only from the pragmatic challenges with which all librarians and archivists must grapple, but also from finely honed cartographic and imperial sensibilities.