Renaissance encyclopaedism

W. Scott Blanchard, Andrea Severi

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.