Spanish books of science and the Indies

Spain discovered and governed half the world in the sixteenth century, and its presses recorded the science that made this possible: the arithmetic of the merchant, the sphere and the sundial, the tables of the astronomer, the relaciones of the captains who sailed to the Strait of Magellan and the chronicles of the Indies. Printed in small numbers, read to pieces and rarely exported, these books are scarce outside the Spanish libraries, and they are catalogued in the bibliographies of Palau, Salvá, Medina and Picatoste rather than in the English-language references.

This page gathers the Spanish and Catalan printing in our collection: the mathematical works of Ciruelo from Alcalá, the commercial arithmetic of Gutiérrez de Gualda, the sundials of Pedro Roiz, the voyage of the Nodal brothers to Cape Horn, Herrera's maps of the Indies and the Aesop of Girona.