Summary

This book aims less at being a history of Spanish libraries during the classical age than at considering - mainly through secondary sources such as treaties on libraries, bibliographies or fictitious libraries - the representations  which libraries then contained or embodied. It is an attempt at restoring some coherence into those representations. Far from ignoring historical realia, this study founds the thematic approach of representations upon a chronological basis. The selected period - a century and a half from Felipe II to Carlos II - is long enough to highlight evolutions. If our corpus includes about thirty representations, three of them are most significant in the progression : the plans for a Royal library and the ambiguities of the building of the Escurial in the second half of the 16th century, the thought of the Catholic Reformers in the first half of the 17th century - in particular through the Musei sive Bibliothecae libri quattuor by a Jesuit from Franche-Comté Claude Clément -, and finally, in the second half of the 17th century, another type of library, the bibliographical library, best typified by the Bibliotheca Hispana by Nicolás Antonio.
In spite of a background generally hostile to books and of the ideological constraints that everyone knows about, the library aroused the enthusiasm of part of the Spanish élite and gave birth to many plans. However, the scholarly dimension which is a feature of most works must not lead us to forget these more singular, less numerous but incomparably deep works of imagination which Quixote by Cervantes or Criticón by Gracián best exemplify.

Key-words : Antonio (Nicolás) - Cervantes (Miguel de) - Clément (Claude) - Counter-Reform - Escorial - Golden Age - Gracián (Baltasar) - humanism - library - representations