Bibliotecas privadas de Navarra

Welcome to the Bibliotecas Privadas de Navarra (Private Libraries of Navarre) Catalog

This is the product of research by Alexandra Wingate of the College of William and Mary conducted in 2016 and 2017 at the Archivo Diocesano de Pamplona (ADP) and the Archivo General y Real de Navarra (AGN) through the support of the College of William and Mary's Monroe Scholars program, Earl Gregg Swem Library, and others. Thank you to both the ADP and the AGN for their support throughout this entire research process. This would not be possible without their help.

This website is intended to be a resource for anyone interested in early modern private libraries of Navarre, Spanish book history, and the history of reading. You are welcome to use the information here in your own research as long as you credit the website and its creator, Alexandra Wingate.

Navigation

In the catalog, users may explore the different books that appear in the inventories of various individuals. You may narrow your search by several metrics, including title, author, language, genre, format, owner, etc. It is designed to allow the curious to browse and the serious to find what they need. Each item is defined as specifically as possible. In some cases it is possible to identify the exact edition that an individual possessed, but not always. The majority of the bibliographic information comes from resources like the Universal Short Title Catalogue (USTC) and WorldCat.

In the authors tab, there is a listing of all of the authors that appear in the catalog and how many works associated with their name appear in the catalog. Some authors will have links to articles about them, but because of the sheer number of authors, this is not possible for all of them.

In the owners tab, there are links to pages for each of the owners. Each page contains biographical information on each individual taken from the procesos (court cases) that involved their goods. For now, that biographical information is fairly sparse, but will increase. It will also contain the transcription of the post-mortem inventory of their books (with identification of the titles) and eventually the other documents from the proceso.

The stats tab contains statistical breakdowns and analysis of the information in the inventories.

The genres tab is a schematic of the genres and subgenres that appear in the catalog. Using several secondary sources and the USTC's own system of classification, genres have been selected in such a way that is not anachronistic with the original context of the books. The division of knowledge has changed greatly since the 16th century and so the goal was to base the genre schematic on library classifications of the 16th and 17th centuries.