WhoFish - Local Events and Activities

Title:	Hernndo Coln and the Total Library
Date:	2/4/2026 (Wednesday)
Address:	121 Wall St, New Haven, CT, United States, Connecticut 06511
Location:	New Haven, CT
Hours:	Wednesday, February 4, 2026 at 4:00PM 6:00PM EST
Cost/Cover:	See Details
Contact Info:	See Details

Details:

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 Colns 16th-century Libro de los epitomes in the Arnamagnan Manuscript Collection at the University of Copenhagen.

The manuscript is just one of various bibliographic tools that humanist collector Coln, 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 Coln 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 Librarians Atlas: The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain, that connects the desire of humanist collectors such as Coln to codify the world through early bibliographic cataloguing to the colonial project.