The Universal Library Unlocked: An Edition and Translation of Hernando Colón's Libro de los Epitomes

Partners and collaborators

University of Cambridge; University of Granada; University of Copenhagen

Description

In the early sixteenth century Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus, conceived an ambition to create a universal library containing “every book, in every language and on every subject, from within Christendom and without”. He devised various systems to catalogue and organize this vast repository of knowledge, one of which was a plan to summarize the contents of all the books. The result was the Libro de los Epitomes (Book of Epitomes), a thousand-page manuscript containing thousands of Latin summaries of books from the greatest library of the Renaissance.

The recent identification of the Libro at the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen, where it had lain for centuries unrecognized inside a largely Nordic collection, caught the public imagination and gained wide coverage from the press, allowing a team of international scholars to embark on the painstaking process of making the contents available to modern readers. In 2024 a team in Copenhagen completed a project funded by a grant from the Carlsberg Foundation to preserve, digitize and conduct fundamental research on the manuscript. We then took up the baton to begin the arduous task of critically editing and translating the Latin text in its entirety.

The edition, under contract with Oxford University Press, is under the General Editorship of Paul White (Leeds), Edward Wilson-Lee (Cambridge) and José Maria Perez Fernandez (Granada). Paul White is leading the critical editing and translation into English of the 500,000 words of Latin text in the Arnamagnæan manuscript. Critical editing involves establishing a correct Latin text by comparing variants in the manuscript witnesses and emending the text where it is faulty. The number of editorial emendations required runs into the thousands.

The resulting critical edition and translation in six print volumes and an online edition will total over 1.5 million words.