Castle to castle: The Saadian Library in the El Escorial Collection

The title of Ferdinand Céline’s novel resumes the fate of the Saadian sultans’ library and the premonitory curiosity its founder, Aḥmad al-Manṣūr, is said to have had for the palace Philip II of Spain was building in the El Escorial.  Over the last few years, the ERC-funded SICLe project has been retrieving information from the roughly two thousand manuscripts of the collection. This thorough survey shows that the history of the Saadian library is more complicated than is commonly thought and that its contents, both material and immaterial, can shed a new light on the cultural and intellectual life in sixteenth-century Morocco.