Hernando Colón, the younger son of Christopher Columbus, collected books on a phenomenal scale, amassing a library of over 15,000 volumes in the three decades before his death in 1539. Many of his books were later lost, but a quarter of the collection remains in Seville as the Biblioteca Colombina. A librarian as well as a bibliophile, Hernando produced various reference works to keep track of his books and facilitate their use. One of these was the Book of Epitomes.

The Libro de los Epítomes is a compilation of “epitomes” or abstracts of works in Colón’s library, begun circa 1523. A huge but incomplete copy, believed to be lost, has in fact been housed since 1730 at the University of Copenhagen. Together with a partial draft that was already known to survive in Seville, this discovery enables us to reconstruct much of the text.

The aim of our project is to publish a critical edition of the Latin text of the Epitomes together with an English translation. This is a collaboration between the University of Cambridge, the Universidad de Granada and the University of Leeds.