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Part of
Translation in Knowledge, Knowledge in Translation
Edited by Rocío G. Sumillera, Jan Surman and Katharina Kühn
[Benjamins Translation Library 154] 2020
► pp. 15–40

Chapter 1
Reading scientific translations in the first half of sixteenth-century Europe through Hernando Colón’s library

| University of Granada

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.

Keywords: Hernando Colón, Biblioteca Colombina, book trade, translation of scientific texts, early modern science
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
Published online: 29 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.154.01sum
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