Chapter 1
Reading scientific translations in the first half of sixteenth-century Europe
through Hernando Colón’s library
The humanist Hernando Colón (1488–1539),
second son to Christopher Columbus, has been acknowledged as one of the greatest
collectors of manuscripts and printed works of sixteenth-century Europe. Hernando
acquired all kinds of works (from cheap pamphlets to expensive illustrated volumes),
in a variety of European cities (from London to Seville, from Rome to Nuremberg),
written in various languages (Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German,
Greek, Catalan), and dealing with topics ranging from theology and law, to cartography and
astrology charts. This chapter examines the translated scientific texts in
Hernando’s library to shed light on a number of determining factors that can account
for the fortunes of the dissemination of scientific literature in translation,
including the cities where these translated texts were published and purchased, and
issues such as language combinations, translators and printers.
Article outline
- 1.The SPTT corpus
- 2.Top authors in the SPTT corpus
- 3.Cities of publication and publishers
- 4.Ranking of cities of purchase in the SPTT corpus
- 5.Conclusion
-
Notes
-
References
-
Appendix