ABSTRACT
As a bibliographic form, the compilation was compendious enough to accommodate representations of the “nouelties” of abundant new worlds with a professedly scholarly refinement: the all-embracing compilations of the sixteenth century helped their readers to make sense of a seemingly uncontained, expanded world, not only through their sheer bulk but also in the representational strategies that could accommodate and duly order an increasingly complicated world. We can find indications of the role of texts in constructing and explaining a world of difference by reading the complex biographies, and not just the sentences, of the texts themselves – that is to say, the accumulation and packaging of contributing elements, the changed iterations of translated texts, the editorial efforts at reframing narratives for a new context, and the deployment of images and tables.
