Stats

Here are some useful breakdowns of the data. More will be added as time passes. Genre and language are two of the most interesting and more easily representable sets of data.

Some types of analysis might seem like an obvious choice at first glance, but they may not actually work well. For example, it sounds enlightening to find the average number of titles by each profession, but there's actually too wide of a variation in size for this to have any reasonable value. Plus, it can be thrown off by true collectors of books such as the Licenciado Pedro de Ollacarizqueta and the family library of Mariana Vicenta de Echeverri which each have more than 450 books. However, if you have suggestions, do please send them to bibliotecasnavarras@gmail.com

Genre

Here we have a few different representations of the proportion of genres. In these first two images, the relative size of the name of each genre corresponds to the number of titles attributed to each genre. As we can see in the first image, religion outweighs every other category. The only categories even close are those titles that are uncategorized or belong to law, history, or classical.

In this second image, religion, uncategorized, and law have been removed to see the relative proportion of the genres with less titles. History and classical of course top this group since they were the only other categories to be visible in the last image, but now we can see a great importance of dictionaries and grammars, astronomy and astrology, philosophy, didactic works, and poetry among others.

Here you can look at the number of titles for each genre, though unfortunately they cannot be treated as comma separated values as in the catalog or the images above. Religion receives over 1,300 titles, which is not surprising considering that the majority of the owners of these inventories are clergymen.

In this next graph, you can see the total number of cases a genre appears in. Religious books appear in every single case, highlighting the importance of religion in the lives of all of these individuals, clergy and laity alike. The appearance of law books in at least 19 of the cases is an interesting one, especially considering that only two of the individuals are lawyers. Language, represented by dictionaries and grammars, as well as history are common topics.

language

Unsurprisingly, Castillian Spanish and Latin dominate the inventories. This first chart, "Language Breakdown per Owner" shows the percentages of titles in each language based on the language category which includes guesses and items where the language is unknown. The second chart, "Estimated Language Breakdown per Owner," has all of the unknowns taken out and the guesses are imagined to be certain (e.g. French? becomes French). In this second chart, the owners are sort from the earliest death in 1501 (Fernando de Baquedano) to the latest death in 1694 (Lorenzo de Yoldi). Generally speaking, it seems that the red Castilian bar grows as the purple Latin bar diminishes. This could be the sign of a growing preference for vernacular works over those in Latin.