Project description
Reconstruction and study of Hernando Colón’s library and cultural heritage
Hernando Colón (1488-1539), the second son of Christopher Columbus, assembled a library comprising thousands of books, each documented and integrated into an innovative indexing system. Today, the Biblioteca Capitular y Colombina in Seville is known to preserve over one third of his collection, along with manuscript indexes that allow to reconstruct the missing portions. The ERC-funded COLIBRI project will study the contents and the legacy of Colón's extraordinary library, as well as the dynamics of its formation and dispersal, exploring the intersection of print and manuscript culture, the early European and transatlantic book trade, Colón’s intellectual and social networks, and the enduring impact of his cultural initiatives.
Objective
While newly printed books were circulating widely around Europe, when more than half a century had passed since Gutenbergs invention, Hernando Coln (1488-1539), second son of Christopher Columbus, undertook the extraordinary challenge of keeping physical track of the proliferation of knowledge. He not only purchased everything, incessantly, and everywhere, marking on the books place and date of purchase, the local price, and the conversion to Spanish currency; for accessing, managing and reusing his colossal library, he and his invisible technicians also developed a sophisticated cross-indexing and symbols system which is foundational in the history of bibliography and knowledge management. The Colombina library of Seville still preserves over one third of the almost 16,000 titles which Coln left at his death, as well a dozen manuscript indexes and catalogues that, recording all sorts of information, make it possible to reconstruct the lost portions of the collection, including the volumes famously shipwrecked on their way from Venice to Seville in 1521. Financing, gathering, cataloguing and managing a library of such scale required widespread connections, the support of an international network, and a vision deeply intertwined with the politics of knowledge acquisition of the new-born Spanish Empire.
COLIBRI aims at opening the doors and explore the legacy of the most important library of the early modern period, completing the reconstruction of its content in order to investigate it; understanding how it worked as the first large-scale information processing system of modern times, and as a place for the production, not only for the storage and preservation, of knowledge; exploring the still new relationship between written and print culture and the early European and intercontinental book market; finally, showing how the movement and the stories of Colons books reflect the developments of Western culture of the last five centuries.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2024-STG
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00185 Roma
Italy
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