Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance

Cambridge University Press, 10/17/2013
EAN 9781107038233, ISBN10: 1107038235

Hardcover, 615 pages, 24.7 x 17.4 x 3.1 cm
Language: English

There is a rich body of encyclopaedic writing which survives from the two millennia before the Enlightenment. This book sheds new light on that material. It traces the development of traditions of knowledge ordering which stretched back to Pliny and Varro and others in the classical world. It works with a broad concept of encyclopaedism, resisting the idea that there was any clear pre-modern genre of the 'encyclopaedia', and showing instead how the rhetoric and techniques of comprehensive compilation left their mark on a surprising range of texts. In the process it draws attention to both remarkable similarities and striking differences between conventions of encyclopaedic compilation in different periods, with a focus primarily on European/Mediterranean culture. The book covers classical, medieval (including Byzantine and Arabic) and Renaissance culture in turn, and combines chapters which survey whole periods with others focused closely on individual texts as case studies.

1. Introduction
Jason König and Greg Woolf
Part I. Classical Encyclopaedism
2. Encyclopaedism in the Roman Empire Jason König and Greg Woolf
3. Encyclopaedism in the Alexandrian Library Myrto Hatzimichali
4. Labores pro bono publico
the burdensome mission of Pliny's Natural History Mary Beagon
5. Encyclopaedias of virtue? Collections of sayings and stories about wise men in Greek Teresa Morgan
6. Plutarch's corpus of Quaestiones in the tradition of imperial Greek encyclopaedism Katerina Oikonomopoulou
7. Artemidorus' Oneirocritica as fragmentary encyclopaedia Daniel Harris-McCoy
8. Encyclopaedias and autocracy
Justinian's Encyclopaedia of Roman law Jill Harries
9. Late Latin encyclopaedism
towards a new paradigm of practical knowledge Marco Formisano
Part II. Medieval Encyclopaedism
10. Byzantine encyclopaedism of the ninth and tenth centuries Paul Magdalino
11. The imperial systematisation of the past in Constantinople
Constantine VII and his Historical Excerpts András Németh
12. Ad maiorem Dei gloriam
Joseph Rhakendytès' synopsis of Byzantine learning Erika Gielen
13. Shifting horizons
the medieval compilation of knowledge as mirror of a changing world Elizabeth Keen
14. Isidore's Etymologies
on words and things Andrew Merrills
15. Loose Giblets
encyclopaedic sensibilities of ordinatio and compilatio in later medieval English literary culture and the sad case of Reginald Pecock Ian Johnson
16. Why was the fourteenth century a century of Arabic encyclopaedism? Elias Muhanna
17. Opening up a world of knowledge
Mamluk encyclopaedias and their readers Maaike van Berkel
Part III. Renaissance Encyclopaedism
18. Revisiting Renaissance encyclopaedism Ann Blair
19. Philosophy and the Renaissance encyclopaedia
some observations D. C. Andersson
20. Reading 'Pliny's Ape' in the Renaissance
the Polyhistor of Caius Julius Solinus in the first century of print Paul Dover
21. Shakespeare's encyclopaedias Neil Rhodes
22. Big Dig
Dugdale's drainage and the dregs of England History of Embanking and Drayning Claire Preston
23. Irony and encyclopedic writing before (and after) the Enlightenment William West
Part IV. Chinese Encyclopaedism
A Postscript
24. The passion to collect, select, and protect
fifteen hundred years of the Chinese encyclopaedia Harriet Zurndorfer.