Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance

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. 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.

Jason König is Senior Lecturer in Greek at the University of St Andrews, working broadly on the Greek literature and culture of the Roman Empire. He is author of Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and he is editor, jointly with Tim Whitmarsh, of Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Greg Woolf is Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews. He currently holds a Major Leverhulme Research Fellowship and is editor of the Journal of Roman Studies. His books include Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul (1998); Et Tu Brute: The Murder of Julius Caesar and Political Assassination (2006); Tales of the Barbarians: Ethnography and Empire in the Roman West (2011); and Rome: An Empire's Story (2012). He has also edited volumes on literacy, on the city of Rome and on Roman religion and has published widely on ancient history and Roman archaeology.