The Lives of Early Modern Librarians

Organisation

Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University, Italian Studies, pmt2114@columbia.edu) et Fabien Montcher (Saint Louis University, history, fabien.montcher@slu.edu), avec l’aide de Guillaume Calafat (IHMC, université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne / IUF, guillaume.calafat@univ-paris1.fr)

En collaboration avec l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (IHMC), St. Louis University (SLU), Columbia Reid Hall, et soutenu par le Columbia Alliance Joint Project Grant, le Columbia European Institute, et le Center for Iberian Historical Studies (SLU).

Programme

December 12, 2025

Salle de conférences, Reid Hall (Columbia University), 4 rue de Chevreuse, Paris 6^e

9:00-9:30 | Introductions

Pier Mattia Tommasino (Columbia University) and Fabien Montcher (St. Louis U. – CIHS)

9:30-10:30 | Is Biography an Individualistic Genre ?

Sabina Loriga (EHESS)

10:30-11:00 | Coffee Break

11:00-12:30 | Becoming a Librarian

Chair : TBC

Guardians of Knowledge and Power : Librarians in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain.

José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero (U. Complutense de Madrid)

Reticence and the Margins : The Elusive Life of Sebastian Tengnagel.

Chiara Petrolini (U. di Bologna)

Looking after and handling. Sebastiano Biavati’s portraits at the roots of curatorship.

Alessandra Russo (Columbia University)

12:30-2:00pm | Lunch

2:00pm-3:30pm | Librarians’ Mobilities and Networks

Chair : Joseph Howley (Columbia University, Classics, and II&I Fellow)

Sebastian Tengnagel and Derviş İbrahim : Multilingual Knowledge-Making in Early Seventeenth-Century Vienna.

Hülya Çelik (Ruhr U. Bochum)

Taking One’s Books as Far from the World as Possible : Fragments of Hispanic Libraries in the Philippines around 1600.

Guillaume Gaudin (U. Toulouse Jean Jaurès – FRAMESPA, UMR 5136)

A Librarian Abroad : Book Collecting, Language Learning, and Diplomatic interventions between Spain and Morocco at the End of the Eighteenth Century.

Claire Gilbert (Saint Louis U. – CIHS)

3:30-4pm | Coffee Break

4:00-5pm | Q&A and Discussion

7:00pm | Dinner

Details about the conference dinner on Dec. 12, coming soon !

December 13, 2025

Bibliothèque du CRHM, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, 14 rue Cujas, Paris 5^e 

9:00-10:30 | Librarians’ Challenges : Fears and Moods

Chair : Guillaume Calafat (Paris 1-Sorbonne)

The Index and the Catalogue : Early Modern Censorship in the Seville Cathedral Library.

Seth Kimmel (Columbia University)

Scholars as Librarians, Librarians as Scholars : Three Cases from the Ottoman World in the Long Sixteenth Century.

A. Tunç Şen (Columbia University)

Does the Librarian’s Bad Mood Have a History ?

Paola Molino (U. of Padua)

10:30-11:00am : Coffee Break

11:00-12:00 | Concluding Remarks : How Early Modern Librarians Connected Worlds (or did not).

Maria Pia Donato (CNRS-IHMC, Paris) 

Abstracts

1. Becoming a Librarian

José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero, Universidad Complutense, Madrid

Guardians of Knowledge and Power : Librarians in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Spain

This paper explores the evolution of library professions in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain, a period marked by profound cultural, political, and social transformations. During these centuries, libraries became strategic spaces not only for the preservation and transmission of knowledge but also for the exercise of power, reflecting the close relationship between cultures of knowledge and different forms of authorities in the Spanish Monarchy. All this took place against the backdrop of intense religious and political conflicts, which put to the test humanist dreams of a new “Universal Library.” In the sixteenth century, the founding of emblematic institutions such as the library of the Monastery of El Escorial highlighted the importance that monarchs and elites attached to the accumulation and organization of knowledge. The sixteenth-century librarian—often a scholar and humanist, such as Arias Montano—was responsible for selecting, classifying, preserving, and advising, while also overseeing and regulating access to collections. At El Escorial, librarians of the time enjoyed considerable status and salaries, reflecting the cultural and political significance of their office.

In the seventeenth century, the professional identity of the librarian took clearer shape across Europe, influenced in part by Gabriel Naudé’s proposals in France. Librarians became recognized specialists with formal training, responsible for creating bibliographic control tools and guiding readers intellectually. The reception of these ideas in Spain will also be analyzed. Finally, the paper considers the impact of the political, economic, and religious crises of the seventeenth century on libraries and their staff. The decline of the monarchy and the loss of religious unity weakened many public institutions, though private libraries maintained vitality through the dedication of their caretakers.

Chiara Petrolini, Università di Bologna

Reticence and the Margins : The Elusive Life of Sebastian Tengnagel

Sebastian Tengnagel (1573–1636), imperial librarian in Vienna, remains a curiously elusive figure. A quietly influential authority in the field of Oriental studies, he was known for his discretion and minimal public presence. His intellectual formation took shape through encounters with both celebrated scholars and librarians (such as Gruter, Casaubon, Holstenius and other major intellectuals of his time) and figures who remain outside the traditional networks of erudition : soldiers, missionaries, dragomans, and priests. His persistent reticence was not just a personal trait but a response to the unstable religious and political context in which he lived, across confessional boundaries, and in spaces where caution and silence were often necessary. I will focus on the mix of visible and less visible relationships that shaped his role, paying particular attention to marginalia, alba amicorum, and a group of looted books that were part of his collection. If time allows, I may also mention his correspondence with Pietro della Valle, whose flamboyant life and style offer an interesting contrast. Rather than reconstructing a full biography, this paper explores how Tengnagel’s presence emerges through silences, traces, and the marginal textures of librarianship in a fractured early modern world.

Alessandra Russo, Columbia University

Sebastiano Biavati’s Portraits at the Roots of Curatorship

Sebastiano Biavati was the salaried “custode” of the private collection of Ferdinando Cospi, in 17th century Bologna. He safeguarded an impressive variety of artifacts and specimens, including Egyptian, Mesoamerican, Etruscan and Chinese objects, paintings and drawings of renowned contemporary artists, a variety of books composed in different writing systems, and naturalia coming from all over the world. When part of this collection was donated by the collector to the City of Bologna, Sebastiano became the symbolic custodian of one of the first public museums. His portrait was in fact hung at the entrance of the Museo Cospiano and in the frontispiece of the museum’s catalogue, Sebastiano is authoratively holding one of the artifacts, signaling his precise responsibility of caring for the object. In my intervention, I will reflect on the biography of Sebastiano the custode and analyse how his portraits, along with other written sources, combine an attempt to register the sensibility of an individual subject with a firm responsibility for the collection. I contend here that looking after and handling, Sebastiano came to embody a new profession.  

2. Librarians’ Mobilities and Networks

Hülya Çelik, Ruhr University Bochum

Sebastian Tengnagel and Derviş İbrahim : Multilingual Knowledge-Making in Early Seventeenth-Century Vienna

Sebastian Tengnagel (d. 1636), a key figure in the early history of the Austrian National Library, was not only its librarian but also a scholar deeply embedded in the networks of the Republic of Letters. His bequest to the library included a significant number of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts, some of which were produced under his direction by a Turkish prisoner named Derviş İbrahim. Tengnagel intended to publish these texts but was ultimately unsuccessful. Nevertheless, he left behind a number of multilingual and multiscript notebooks (e.g., Vienna, ÖNB, Cod. 15161, 15165), which preserve traces of their collaboration – ranging from copied texts and marginal annotations to poems and a letter (ÖNB, Cod. A. F. 32, fol. 76), previously presented by Claudia Römer. This paper investigates Tengnagel’s role not only as a custodian of Oriental manuscripts, but also as a cultural mediator who facilitated the transfer and transformation of Ottoman knowledge practices into the Habsburg world. Drawing on Tengnagel’s private papers and marginalia, as well as on the material contributions of Derviş İbrahim, I argue that the library functioned as a translational and collaborative site, in which linguistic, political, and epistemic boundaries were negotiated. This case sheds light on how Ottoman Turkish textual knowledge was locally produced, transmitted, and recontextualized at the imperial periphery in early seventeenth-century Vienna.

Guillaume Gaudin, Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès – FRAMESPA (UMR 5136)

Taking One’s Books as Far from the World as Possible : Fragments of Hispanic Libraries in the Philippines around 1600

From the 1570s onward, Iberian sujects established a lasting presence in the Philippines, particularly in Manila, where the major monarchical institutions were gradually put in place : the governor, the royal tribunal, the bishopric (later archbishopric), monasteries (Augustinians, Dominicans, Franciscans, Jesuits), and the Inquisition. The king’s agents—including clergy subject to royal patronage—traveled from Mexico or the Iberian Peninsula. Some of them were letrados (university-educated lawyers), while most were literate elites. In a precarious world shaped by the violence of conquest and everyday life colonial experiences, these agents came prepared—they carried an entire arsenal in their baggage. Extremely fragmentary sources also attest to the books that traveled with these individuals. Moreover, Manila saw the printing of its first two works in 1593 : these religious texts, intended for Christian proselytism, were printed in Chinese characters using xylographic techniques and aimed at the Chinese communities of Manila and China. In this paper, I will seek to situate the place of the book—and, where sources allow, the “libraries”—in Manila at the outset of Spanish colonization. I will look for traces of the attachment to and emotions surrounding books transported to the other side of the world and carefully preserved, as far as possible, from the hazards of travel and the multiple risks of the Philippine archipelago.

Claire Gilbert, Saint Louis University

A Librarian Abroad : Book Collecting, Language Learning, and Diplomatic interventions between Spain and Morocco at the End of the Eighteenth Century

This intervention explores the linguistic and bibliographic mission to Morocco of the Escorial arabist and librarian Patricio de la Torre (1760–1819). In 1797, Torre was commissioned to travel from his post in the Hieronymite library to Tangier in order to collect Arabic manuscripts for the Escorial collection. As part of this bibliographic mission, he was also tasked with improving his Arabic skills in both fuṣḥā (classical Arabic) and darija (Moroccan Arabic) and helping Spanish consular officials in Tangier. In his frequent correspondence with Spanish ministers, as well as a short account of his travels in Morocco, Torre reveals frequent frustration with the logistical, political, and personal challenges he faced during his mission. The stress of these challenges was compounded upon his return to Spain, which coincided with the Napoleonic occupation (1808–1814). Throughout his career–at home and abroad–emotions loomed large in Torre’s experiences with bibliographic management, diplomacy, and language learning. The effect of those emotions is reflected in his personal papers as well as his publications, both printed and unpublished. Through this example we can see how social experiences and political context affected the intellectual life of a librarian, as well as Spanish Arabism as a field of study. Torre’s case provides an opportunity to reflect on how to frame and write about the lives of such figures not as exceptions but as products of entangled fields of knowledge and sociability.

3. Librarians’ Challenges : Fears and Moods

Seth Kimmel, Columbia University

The Index and the Catalogue : Early Modern Censorship in the Seville Cathedral Library

In 1662, a canon in the Seville Cathedral named Andrés de Léon y Ledesma systematically censored more than twenty works preserved in the Cathedral library. Léon y Ledesma followed the guidelines set out in the 1640 Index of Prohibited Books as he expurgated the largely early sixteenth-century editions of both ancient and early modern texts, with a particular focus on Erasmus. Many of these texts originally formed part of the collection of the Sevillian bibliophile and cosmographer Hernando Colón, who died in 1539. In seeking to understand both why this process of assessment and expurgation was so belated and how it functioned in material terms, this paper examines the censored works themselves, the relationship between officials in the Seville Cathedral and Holy Office of the Inquisition, and the history of cataloguing and censorship as interconnected endeavors in the Seville Cathedral library and elsewhere. To be sure, censorship renders certain works or part of works difficult or impossible to read or to publish, but it also constituted part of a broader set of bibliographic endeavors that counted preservation among its principal goals.

A. Tunç Şen, Columbia University

Scholars as Librarians, Librarians as Scholars : Three Cases from the Ottoman World in the Long Sixteenth Century

This presentation explores the intersection of scholarship and librarianship within the context of the Ottoman Empire, specifically focusing on the period from the mid-fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century. By examining selected cases of madrasa scholars appointed as librarians either to the royal palace library or to major educational institutions newly established in the capital city of Istanbul, the presentation aims to illuminate the criteria underlying their selection. It investigates the intellectual, social, and administrative factors contributing to the identification, appointment, and, in certain cases, dismissal of these scholarly figures as librarians, and further contextualizes their roles within broader scholarly networks and educational practices of the period. By analyzing appointment records, endowment deeds, contemporary biographical sources, and library inventories, this study elucidates how librarianship in the early modern Ottoman context was intimately intertwined with scholarly prestige, pedagogical expertise, and administrative trust.

Paola Molino, University of Padua

Does the Librarian’s Bad Mood Have a History ?

Certain features of libraries seem perennial : lack of space, inadequate funding and staff, and an overabundance of books—even in periods when technology offered far fewer supports than today. In the early modern era, alongside the professionalization of librarianship, we also see the emergence of enduring traits of the profession : distrust of readers, skepticism toward lending policies, frustration with scarce resources, and resentment at the lack of recognition for a role perceived as vital. Yet although the librarian’s “bad mood” appears to have a long history, the reasons of this discontent have also shifted over time and space—for instance, in conflicts shaped by confessional tensions between library owners and their librarians. Geographical distinctions also emerge, reflecting variations in book technologies and in the social role of librarians across different regions of the world. This paper explores the specifically early modern forms of frustration, distrust, and disillusion, and their impact on library management in Europe. By adopting both a comparative and long-term perspective, it also demonstrates the variety of sources through which historians can reconstruct librarians’ emotions in the pre-modern world.

Short Bios

Hülya Çelik (Ruhr University Bochum)

Hülya Çelik teaches and researches Ottoman Turkish and modern Turkish literatures and manuscript cultures. Since September 2020, she is a junior professor of Turkish Studies at the Institute of Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Ruhr University Bochum. Her research interests are Ottoman and Turkish literatures and cultures, Turkish literature in Armenian script (Armeno-Turkish), Manuscript traditions and cultures and book printing in the Ottoman Empire and Digital Humanities & Ottoman Studies.

Maria Pia Donato (CNRS-ENS, Paris)

Maria Pia Donato is CNRS Research Professor at Institut d’Histoire Moderne and Contemporaine in Paris. She is a specialist in cultural history and the history of science and medicine, focusing on 17th- and 18th-century Europe. Her recent publications on the history of archives and libraries and on cultural heritage include L’archivio del mondo. Quando Napoleone confiscò la storia (2019, translated into French in 2020), Pratiques d’archives à l’époque modern. Europe, mondes coloniales (ed. With A. Saada, 2019), and Logiques de l’inventaire. Moyen Âge-XIXe siècle (ed. With F. Briegel and V. Theis, 2024).

Guillaume Gaudin (Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès – FRAMESPA (UMR 5136)

Guillaume Gaudin is full professor at Toulouse Jean Jaurès University, a member of the FRAMESPA laboratory (UMR 5136), and director of IPEAT (Institut Pluridisciplinaire pour les Études sur les Amériques à Toulouse). He specializes in the history of the Spanish empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. He is the author of El imperio de papel de Juan Díez de la Calle : pensar y gobernar el Nuevo Mundo en el siglo XVII (Fondo de Cultura Económica, El Colegio de Michoacán, 2017) and L’empire du soleil couchant. Distance et communication entre Manille, Mexico et Madrid (1565- 1609) (Casa de Velazquez, 2025).

Claire Gilbert (Saint Louis University – CIHS)

Claire Gilbert is Associate Professor of Early Modern History at Saint Louis University (SLU). Using archival sources in Spanish, Arabic, French, Italian, and Portuguese, Gilbert’s research explores the politics of language across Arabic and Romance-speaking communities in the Western Mediterranean from the medieval to the modern period. Gilbert is the author of In Good Faith : Arabic Translation and Translators in Early Modern Spain (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), which was awarded Honorable Mention by the Mediterranean Seminar and Association for Spanish and Portuguese Historical Studies Best First Book Prize competitions. Her new book project, Converting Texts : The Modern Legacies of Renaissance Arabic Linguistics across the Mediterranean studies the development of vernacular Arabic linguistics in Iberia and Morocco between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. It traces intertextual and social relationships between texts and communities in Spain, Portugal, France, Morocco, and across the Ottoman world. Research for this project is supported by the John Carter Brown Library, the Linda Hall Library for the History of Science, the American Institute for Maghribi Studies, and the University of Arizona Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) Faculty Fellowship.

José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero (Universidad Complutense, Madrid)

José Luis Gonzalo Sánchez-Molero is a Professor at the Faculty of Documentation Sciences at the Complutense University of Madrid, where he earned his PhD in Early Modern History. A specialist in the history of books, libraries, and the management of bibliographic heritage, his research has addressed topics such as courtly bibliophilia in sixteenth-century Spain, Philip II’s cultural policies and the formation of the library at El Escorial, as well as Erasmianism, pedagogy in the Early Modern period, and the study of early books in the East. Among his publications are La “Librería rica” de Felipe II, Regia Bibliotheca. El libro en la corte española de Carlos V, Leyendo en Edo. Breve guía sobre el libro antiguo japonés, La cultura en el bolsillo. Historia del libro de bolsillo en España, and Felipe II. La educación de un “felicísimo príncipe” (1527-1545). His research achievements have been recognized with the Bibliography Prize from the National Library of Spain (1997) and the Bartolomé José Gallardo Prize for Bibliographic Research (2002).

Seth Kimmel (Columbia University, LAIC)

Seth Kimmel is an associate professor of early modern cultural studies in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures and director of the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life at Columbia University. His research focuses on Iberian cultural and intellectual history in the context of the wider Mediterranean, with a particular interest in early modern debates about religion. He is the author of two books : Parables of Coercion : Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain, published by the University of Chicago Press in English in 2015 and by Marcial Pons in Spanish in 2020, and The Librarian’s Atlas : The Shape of Knowledge in Early Modern Spain, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2024. Parables of Coercion won the 2017 Harry Levin Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association for best first book in the field of Comparative Literature. 

Sabina Loriga (EHESS)

Sabina Loriga is full professor in History at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. Her research focuses on the relationships between history and biography, the construction of historical time, and public uses of the past. Notable publications include : Une histoire inquiète. Les historiens et le tournant linguistique (avec Jacques Revel), Paris, Éditions Seuil-Gallimard, 2022 ; Le petit x. De la biographie à l’histoire (Paris, Seuil, 2010) ; Soldats. Un laboratoire disciplinaire : l’armée piémontaise au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, Belles Lettres, 2007).

Paola Molino (U. of Padua)

Paola Molino teaches Early Modern History at the University of Padua. She is interested in the history of knowledge, written cultures and libraries. She is the author of L’Impero di carta. Storia di una biblioteca e di un bibliotecario (Vienna, 1575-1608) (Rome, 2017). In the last years she has worked on the mobility of books, handwritten newsletters, library catalogues, geographical maps and the reorganization of knowledge in the 16th-17th centuries.

Chiara Petrolini (U. of Bologna) 

Chiara Petrolini studied at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa and at the National Institute for Renaissance Studies. She was a researcher at the University of Vienna, where she worked on early Orientalism in Central Europe, focusing in particular on the imperial librarian and orientalist Sebastian Tengnagel. She has received fellowships and funding from the Warburg Institute (London), the IFK (International Research Center for Cultural Studies | University of Arts Linz in Vienna), the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Düsseldorf), the German Historical Institute in Rome, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, and the Balzan Foundation. Her research focuses on intellectual, confessional, and political conflicts in early modern Europe ; early Orientalism in Central-Eastern Europe and Italy ; religious conversions ; Paolo Sarpi ; Tommaso Campanella ; and the history of environment and botany.

Alessandra Russo (Columbia University)

Alessandra Russo is an art historian, working as Professor and Chair in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures at Columbia University. She is also the Director of the Hispanic Institute. Russo is the author of : A New Antiquity (2024), The Untranslatable Image (2015), El Realismo Circular (2005) and has edited : Images Take Flight (2015, with G. Wolf and D. Fane), and Spanish Italy and the Iberian Americas (with M. Cole, forthcoming 2026). She curated several exhibitions and is part of the Advisory Board of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts. At the present, she is completing a monograph devoted to Sebastiano Biavati and the Early Modern Museum.

A. Tunç Sen (Columbia University)

A. Tunç Sen is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in the history of the Ottoman Empire and its many connections with the early modern world. As a social and cultural historian of intellectual practices, Şen primarily focuses on how people perceive the world, the frameworks into which they fit information and beliefs, and the social, political, economic, and emotional structures that shaped and were shaped by their ways of knowing. He recently published his first book, entitled Forgotten Experts. Astrologers, Science, and Authority in the Ottoman Empire, 1450-1600, Stanford University Press, 2025.