Renaissance Encyclopaedism: Studies in Curiosity and Ambition

The information explosion of the last two decades has triggered an interest in the historical precursors of such a phenomenon. We are conditioned to some extent to associate the origins of the modern encyclopaedia with the efforts of the French philosophe Denis Diderot in the eighteenth century, and to travel back even further in time for pre-modern examples of the encyclopaedia to the thirteenth century, to the great collections of knowledge of scholastic figures like Vincent of Beauvais. For a variety of reasons that are explored in this volume, Renaissance humanists differed from their scholastic predecessors in their attitudes toward knowledge, their practices of compilation and organization, and the goals towards which they oriented their scholarly pursuits.

"This volume presents important work on a major topic that will remain of interest in coming decades."

-William Connell, Seton Hall University

"One of the main appeals of this book is that it explains the apparent paradox of how a culture that valued breadth of knowledge did not really produce many encyclopaedias as we would recognize them."

-Craig Kallendorf, Texas A & M University

"The erudition and learning in these essays truly are impressive."

-Brian Maxson, East Tennessee State University

W. SCOTT BLANCHARD is Professor of English at Misericordia University. He is the author of Scholars’ Bedlam: Menippean Satire in the Renaissance (Bucknell University Press, 1995) and translator of Francesco Filelfo’s dialogue On Exile for the I Tatti Renaissance Library Series (Harvard University Press, 2013).

ANDREA SEVERI is Junior Researcher at the University of Bologna. He is the author of Filippo Beroaldo il Vecchio un maestro per l’Europa. Da commentatore di classici a classico moderno (1481–1550) (Il Mulino, 2015) and editor of the critical edition of Baptista Mantuanus’s Adolescentia (Bononia University Press, 2010).