Exploring the Print World of Early Modern Iberia

Until very recently, scholars were confronted with a distorted picture of the book world of Renaissance Iberia. Forced to rely on incomplete and fragmented surveys of printing, there was no real basis from which to understand the nature of the Iberian experience or indeed how this contrasted with other European countries. The appearance in 2010 of Iberian Books sought to redress this problem. By knitting together library catalogues and existing bibliographies, scholars now have access to a single bibliography of books printed in Spain, Portugal, Mexico and Peru before 1601 or printed elsewhere in Spanish or Portuguese. They can also access a global survey of surviving copies. This article discusses the rationale and methodology employed by the Iberian Book Project, as well as offering a frank assessment of its limitations. More significantly, however, it harnesses the underlying datasets of the project in an attempt to understand the broader geography of print in the Peninsula, surveying both its structure and the changing patterns of production from the age of incunabula up to the beginning of the seventeenth century.