From the Tree to the Labyrinth
1.3. The Encyclopedias
The role of the encyclopedia has fluctuated over the centuries. The word “encyclopedia” comes from enkyklios
paideia, which signified a complete
education in the Greek tradition. The term “encyclopedia,” however, makes its first appearance in the sixteenth century, first in a different form in
Fleming Joachim Stergk’s
Lucubrationes vel potius absolutissima kuklopaideia (1529), and then in The Boke Named The Governor (1531) by
Sir Thomas Elyot, who, in chapter XIII, on some reasons for the decline of
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education among English gentlemen, cites the encyclopedia as the sum total of knowledge, or the “world of science,” or “the circle of doctrine.” This same sum total of knowledge as a complete education is recommended by Gargantua to his son in book II, chapter 8 of Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel (1532):
That is why, my son, I urge you to employ your youth in making good progress in study [and virtue]. You are in Paris; Epistemon your tutor is with you; both can teach you:
one directly and orally, the other by laudable examples.
I intend and will that you acquire a perfect command of
languages—first Greek (as
Quintilian wishes), secondly Latin, and then Hebrew for the Holy Scriptures, as well as Chaldaean and Arabic likewise— and that, for your Greek, you mould your style by imitating Plato, and for your Latin, Cicero.
Let there be no history which you do not hold ready in memory: to help you, you have the cosmographies of those who have
written on the subject.
When you were still very young —about five or six—I gave you a foretaste of geometry, arithmetic and music among the liberal arts. Follow that up with the other arts. Know all the canons of astronomy, but leave judicial astrology and the Art of Lullius alone as abuses and vanities.
I want you to learn all of the beautiful texts of Civil Law by heart and compare them to moral philosophy.
And as for the knowledge of natural phenomena, I want you to
apply yourself to it with curiosity: let there be no sea, river or stream the fishes of which you do not know. Know all the birds of the air, all the trees, bushes and shrubs of the forests, all the herbs in the soil, all the metals hidden deep in the womb of the Earth, the precious stones of all the Orient and the South: let none remain unknown to you.
Then frequent the books of the ancient medical writers, Greek,
Arabic and Latin, without
Cabbalists; and by frequent dissections acquire a perfect knowledge of that other world which is Man.
And for a few hours every day start to study the Sacred Writings: first the Gospels and Epistles of the Apostles in Greek, then the Old Testament in Hebrew. In short, let me see you an abyss of erudition.
In book II, chapter 20, Thaumastes praises the young Pantagruel’s culture, saying: “I swear he discovered, for my
benefit, the true source, well and abyss of the encyclopedia of learning.”
In 1536 we find the term in Juan Luis Vives’s De disciplinis, in which he calls “encyclopedia” the various things that the educand must know, with explicit reference to Pliny and other classical encyclopedists. As part of the title of a book the word appears in Paulus Scalichius de Lika’s Encyclopediae seu
orbis disciplinarum tam sacrarum quam profanarum epistemon (Basel,
1559).
1.3.1. Pliny and the Model of the Ancient Encyclopedia
No Greek encyclopedias, at least in the sense of compilations of previous knowledge, have survived. Of course,
the works of Aristotle are an
encyclopedia, ranging as they do from logic to astronomy and from the study of animals to human psychology. They are not presented, however, as a collection of shared knowledge, but as a fresh offering. Likewise, in a Latin context, rather than an encyclopedic collection of facts, Lucretius’s De rerum natura aspires to be a systematic exposition of “scientific” truths.
The works that have been seen as examples of Greek encyclopedism are
instead expressions, frequently
incidental, of curiosity and wonder over fabulous lands and peoples: in this sense an encyclopedic component has been identified in the Odyssey. Encyclopedic interests are definitely present in Herodotus when he describes the marvels of Egypt and of other barbaric
peoples. The Greek Alexander
Romance, though its actual date is
uncertain and its attribution to
Callisthenes, a contemporary of
composed at the beginning of the Hellenistic period and, while claiming to narrate the adventures of the famous Macedonian condottiere, presents itself in fact as a travel guide to marvelous places teeming with extraordinary creatures.
It was the mature Alexandrian period
that produced many works of
paradoxography, devoted to the presentation of remarkable things and events, such as the treatise devoted by Strato of Lampsacus to unusual animals, the Mirabilia of Callimachus, or that of Antigonus of Carystus, while the De
assemblage or miscellany of little- known facts in the fields of botany, mineralogy, zoology, hydrography, and mythology, once attributed to Aristotle, can be assigned to Hellenistic circles of the third century B.C. Finally, we may
speak of specialized encyclopedias in the case of later geographical compendia such as Pomponius Mela’s De situ orbis (first century A.D.), Aelian’s De natura animalium (second / third century) or
t h e Lives of the Philosophers by Diogenes Laertius (second / third century).
compendia of curious facts and erudite digressions (like the Noctes Atticae, composed by Aulus Gellius in the second century A.D., or specialized
encyclopedias such as Pomponius
Mela’s) and an encyclopedia in the
global and organic sense of the word, a
work that aspires in other words to be an
exhaustive catalogue of existing
knowledge.
The Hellenistic world assigned the role that Roman and medieval scholars
would eventually assign to the
encyclopedia, not to a single volume that deals with everything, but to a collection of all existing volumes, the library, as
well as to a collection of all things possible, the museum. The museum and library built in Alexandria by Ptolemy I (said to have held, depending on the period, between 500,000 and 700,000 volumes) formed the nucleus of a veritable university, a center for the collection, research, and transmission of knowledge.
The encyclopedic attitude took shape instead in Roman circles, in which the whole of Greek knowledge was gathered together, in a labor of appropriation of the patrimony of that Graecia capta which ferum victorem cepit. An early example is the Rerum divinarum et
humanarum antiquitates of Terentius
Varro (first century B.C.), of which only
fragments have survived, which dealt with history, grammar, mathematics, philosophy, astronomy, geography, agriculture, law, rhetoric, the arts, literature, the biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, the history of the gods. We do possess, however, the 37 books of Pliny the Elder’s Historia
Naturalis (first century A.D.,
approximately 20,000 facts cited and 500 authors consulted), devoted to the heavens and the universe in general, the
prodigious births and burials, the earth’s fauna, creatures of the deep, birds, insects, vegetables, medicines derived from vegetable and animal sources, metals, painting, precious stones and gems.
At first sight, Pliny’s work appears to be a mere confused jumble of facts, with no structure, but, if we turn our attention to the immense index, we realize that the work begins in fact with the heavens, going on to deal with geography, demography, and ethnography, followed by anthropology and human physiology, zoology, botany, agriculture, gardening, natural pharmacology, medicine, and
magic, before proceeding to mineralogy, architecture, and the plastic arts—setting up a sort of hierarchy proceeding from the original to the derivative, from the natural to the artificial—according to the arborescent structure illustrated in
Figure 1.11
This aspect should also be borne in mind for what we will have to say about
subsequent encyclopedias. An
encyclopedia always relies for its organization on a tree—whose model is invariably, on a more or less conscious level, that of the binary subdivision of a Porphyrian tree. But the difference between the Arbor Porphyriana and the encyclopedic tree (which amounts, openly or in a dissimulated fashion, to a table of contents) is that the Porphyrian tree claims to use the terms of its
disjunctions as primitives, not susceptible of further definition, and at the same time indispensable for defining
something else, while in the
encyclopedic index each node is referred to the notions that define it and will be presented in the course of the overall discussion. And in this sense classifications like those of the natural sciences also have or can assume the role of an index.
This difference is fundamental to an
understanding of the history of
encyclopedias and their indices. For a long time the encyclopedist used his index as a working tool that was
basically not supposed to be of interest to the reader, whose need instead was for the information the encyclopedia
contained—in other words, the
encyclopedist was concerned with
where he was going to put the crocodile,
but he believed in principle that what the reader was interested in were the crocodile’s empirical properties, not its place in the classification. Instead, this point of view gradually changed in the case of many modern encyclopedias, whose primary aim was precisely to provide a model of the organization of knowledge. It was some time, however, before the “plan” of an encyclopedia
began to constitute an object of reflection or of meta-encyclopedic
comment. For the reader, the
encyclopedia appeared as a “map” of different territories whose edges were jagged and often imprecise, so that one had the impression of moving through it as if it were a labyrinth that allowed one to choose paths that were constantly new, without feeling obliged to stick to a route leading from the general to the particular.
The second aspect of how Pliny lays out a model for encyclopedias to come is that he does not speak of things he
knows from experience but of things handed down to him by tradition, and he does not make the slightest effort to separate reliable empirical information from legend (he gives equal space to the crocodile and the basilisk). This point is extremely important in defining the encyclopedia as a theoretical model: the
encyclopedia does not claim to register what really exists but what people traditionally believe exists—and hence everything that an educated person should know, not simply to have knowledge of the world, but also to understand discourses about the world.
in the Hellenistic encyclopedias (a great
many paragraphs in the pseudo-
Ar i s to te l i a n De mirabilibus, for example, employ a verbum dicendi such as “they say that” or “the story goes that” or “it is said that”), and it will remain a constant in medieval encyclopedias, as well as in those of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Foucault reminds us that Buffon was astonished that in a
sixteenth-century naturalist like
Aldrovandi there was “an inextricable mixture of exact descriptions, quotations from other authors, fables relayed uncritically, observations which dealt indiscriminately with the anatomy,
habitat, and mythological properties of an animal, and the uses that could be made of it in medicine or in magic.” In fact, as Foucault goes on to comment:
When one goes back to take a look at the Historia serpentum et
draconum, one finds the chapter
“On the serpent in general” arranged under the following headings: equivocation (which means the various meanings of the word serpent), synonyms and etymologies, differences, form and description, anatomy, nature and
habits, temperament, coitus and generation, voice, movements,
places, diet, physiognomy,
antipathy, sympathy, modes of capture, death and wounds caused by the serpent, modes and signs of poisoning, remedies, epithets, denominations, prodigies and presages, monsters, mythology, gods to which it is dedicated, fables, allegories and mysteries,
hieroglyphics, emblems and
symbols, proverbs, coinage,
miracles, riddles, devices,
heraldic signs, historical facts, dreams, simulacra and statues, use
in human diet, use in medicine, miscellaneous uses. Whereupon Buffon comments: “Let it be judged after that what proportion of natural history is to be found in such a hotch-potch of writing. There is no description here, only
legend.” And indeed, for
Aldrovandi and his
contemporaries, it was all legenda —things to be read. But the reason for this was not that they preferred the authority of men to the precision of an unprejudiced eye, but that nature, in itself, is an unbroken tissue of words and
signs, of accounts and characters, of discourse and forms. When one is faced with the task of writing an animal’s history, it is useless and impossible to choose between the profession of naturalist and that of compiler: one has to collect together into one and the same form of knowledge all that has been seen and heard, all that has been recounted, either by nature or by men, by the language of the world, by tradition, or by the poets. (Foucault 1970: 38–39)
Foucault sees this tendency as typical of the sixteenth-century episteme, whereas, as we have seen and as we will see, it is a characteristic of every idea of encyclopedia, from Pliny to the present day. In fact what distinguishes a contemporary encyclopedia like the
Britannica, the French Larousse or the
I t a l i a n Treccani from Pliny’s
encyclopedias or the medieval
encyclopedias or Aldrovandi’s
encyclopedia and so on, is simply the critical attention devoted to separating legendary ideas from those that are scientifically proven (but only because today this difference too, ontological in
nature, is considered part of what every educated person should know). Aside from this difference—which acquires relevance, let’s say, between Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Diderot and D’Alembert’s mid-eighteenth-century
Encyclopédie—a contemporary encyclopedia is also expected in principle to tell us everything that has been said, whether it be about sulfuric acid or Apollo or the sorcerer Merlin.
1.3.2. Medieval Encyclopedias
Compared with Pliny, medieval
encyclopedias have a different origin and serve different purposes. If we are to understand their nature, we must begin with Augustine, whose concern was with the problem of the correct interpretation of Scripture and took into consideration, not only the signs produced by human beings in an effort to convey meaning, and the natural phenomena that may be interpreted as signs (De doctrina
christiana II, 1, 1), but also, since
Scripture speaks not only in verbis but also in factis (De trinitate XV, 9, 15), events and things of sacred history that
have been supernaturally arranged so as to be read as signs. Augustine taught how to resolve the question of whether a sign was to be understood in a literal or a figurative sense, and he said that we
must suspect a figurative sense
whenever Scripture appears to go against the truths of faith and moral behavior or gets lost in superfluitates or brings into play expressions not especially meaningful from the literal point of view (proper names, numbers
and technical terms, elaborate
descriptions of flowers, natural
prodigies, precious stones, vestments 18
and ceremonies, objects and events irrelevant from the spiritual point of view).
To interpret the figurative meaning of these facts we must appeal to our knowledge of the world. In De doctrina
christiana (II, 57) Augustine insists at
length upon the fact that lacunae in our knowledge of things render figurative expressions obscure. If we are to understand why Scripture commands us to be as wise as serpents, we must know that, in the real world, the serpent offers its entire body to the aggressor in order to protect its head. And only if we know that the serpent, by forcing itself through
the narrow entrance of its hole, sloughs off its old skin and is endowed with fresh strength, can we understand what the Apostle means when he explains how to put off the old man and put on the new man by passing through the “strait gate” (Matt. 7: 13).
The same thing is true of precious stones and herbs. Knowing that the carbuncle shines in the dark illuminates many obscure passages of Scripture, while knowing that hyssop is effective in freeing the lungs from catarrh explains why it is said: “Purge me with hyssop and I shall be clean” (Psalm 51: 7). To understand why Moses, Elijah, and Jesus
fasted for forty days we must bear in mind that the course of the day and that of the year are measured in terms of the number 4, the day according to divisions into four groups of hours that make up morning, midday, evening, and night, the year according to the four seasons. Similarly, we need to have a good knowledge of music: if we come across a mention of a psaltery with ten strings, we must be aware that the actual instrument does not call for that many strings if we are to deduce that what we have here is a reference to the Ten Commandments.
It is basically as a response to this need to interpret the Scriptures that medieval encyclopedias come into existence and circulate. They are different from Roman encyclopedias in that, although they too are concerned with explaining what the world is like, they are still more concerned to explain
how the sacred texts are to be understood. To give a single example
among the many possible, in the ninth century Rabanus Maurus insists that he speaks not only of the nature of things “sed etiam de mystica earumdem rerum significatione” (“but also of the mystical meaning of those things,” De rerum
naturis, PL 111, 12d).
The earliest encyclopedia of this type, however, antedates Augustine; we are referring to the first moralized bestiary, the Physiologus, a Greek work by an anonymous author composed in the early centuries A.D., though the Latin
versions, each of which incidentally expands upon the original text, only appear toward the seventh century. This little work draws upon works by Pliny and other ancient authors (such as the
Polyhistor of Solinus or the Alexander Romance) for information on the various
adds an allegorical or moral interpretation. Here, for example, is the entry on “viper”:
John said to the Pharisees, “Ye generation of vipers” [Matt. 3:7 and Lk. 3:7]. Physiologus says of the viper that the male has the face of a man, while the female has the form of a woman down to her navel, but from her navel down to her tail she has the form of a crocodile. Indeed the woman has no secret place, that is, genitals for giving birth, but has only a
pinhole. If the male lies with the female and spills his seed into her mouth, and if she drinks his seed,