Ebook: Encyclopaedism from antiquity to the Renaissance

"Shedding new light on the rich body of encyclopaedic writing surviving from the two millennia before the Enlightenment, this book 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. The focus is 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"--;Illustrations -- Abbreviations -- Contributors -- Preface -- 1 Introduction -- The boundaries of encyclopaedism -- Common ground -- Encyclopaedic variations -- Part I Classical encyclopaedism -- 2 Encyclopaedism in the Roman empire -- Encyclopaedism before Rome -- The classical bookworld -- Landmarks of encyclopaedism in the late republic and early empire -- Common features -- Single-subject works -- Miscellanies and exempla -- Late antiquity -- 3 Encyclopaedism in the Alexandrian library -- Introduction -- The politics of Alexandrian encyclopaedism -- Callimachus' Pinakes -- The homeric proto-encyclopaedia -- Lexicography -- Conclusion -- 4 Labores pro bono publico -- Introduction: nobis Quiritium solis -- sole authorship of an all-embracing work -- Labores pro bono publico I: ancestral exemplars, imperial imitators -- Labores pro bono publico II: the encyclopaedic mission -- Utilitas vitae: the life-enhancing nature of 'nature, that is, life' -- Ordering nature: roads through the wilderness -- Molem illam Historiae Naturalis: the encyclopaedist's cultural burden -- 5 Encyclopaedias of virtue? -- Introduction -- Ancient wisdom collections -- On system -- Comprehensiveness -- Authority -- Conclusion -- 6 Plutarch's corpus of quaestiones in the tradition of imperial Greek encyclopaedism -- Rethinking the ancient quaestio -- Plutarch's quaestiones in context: reading quaestiones-literature in the high empire -- Plutarch's quaestiones: content and intellectual outlook -- Selective reading: the Plutarchan quaestiones as reference works? -- Consecutive reading, and its subtexts -- Conclusion -- 7 Artemidorus' Oneirocritica as fragmentary encyclopaedia -- Introduction -- Contemporary criticism of the encyclopaedia -- The infinite requirements of divination -- The Oneirocritica as fragmentary encyclopaedia -- Effects on composition.;"Shedding new light on the rich body of encyclopaedic writing surviving from the two millennia before the Enlightenment, this book 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"--