Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age by Mary Franklin-Brown (review)

This ambitious study of thirteenth-century encyclopedic writing takes Vincent de Beauvais's enormous Speculum maius as its focal point for discussing the fractured presentation of knowledge in texts by three authors. It is divided into three parts, the first a broad survey of the ordering and presentation of textual knowledge that draws on Foucault and demonstrates his limitations for understanding the sophistication of medieval epistemic discourses. The works of Thomas de Cantimpré and Bartholomeus Anglicus, and particularly Vincent's Speculum, are situated in the context of the legacy of Augustinian textual practices, whose authority was being challenged by the influx of Aristotelian philosophy. The opening chapter is itself encyclopedic in its sweep of the different textual forms used to present and represent knowledge in the Middle Ages. The middle section has a chapter each on the Speculum, on Raymond Llull's Arbor scientiae in Latin and Catalan, and on Jean de Meun's continuation of the medieval French poem the Roman de la rose, and aims to understand these last two authors in relation to the 'heterogeneity of encyclopedism' (p. 8). Particularly persuasive is the use of medieval rhetorical theory to understand Vincent's repeated attempts to order his Speculum in a coherent and consistent narrative. This consideration of Vincent's rhetoric allows his encyclopedism to be compared with Llull's various representations of systems of knowledge through figures of trees. Jean de Meun's prosopopeic Nature is read as pushing the rhetorical presentation of knowledge to breaking point, parodying Latin encyclopedists' attempts to order knowledge. In the final third of her study Mary Franklin-Brown reintroduces Foucault to allow her to categorize encylopedic texts as 'heterotopias', bringing together incompatible structures of authority and compelling the reader to become an 'encylopedic subject' judging the relative merits of differing authorities. She provides valuable insights into the production and reception of knowledge in the thirteenth century; discussions of the textual history of Llull's and Vincent's works shed light on the problems they posed to copyists, illuminators, and editors. The figure of the mirror — following the Speculum's punning games around speculare and its cognates and the Rose's self-description as a 'Miroër aux Amoreus' (p. 280) — is the basis for the depiction of a reading subject who encounters the text as a fractured reflection of both him- or herself and of the world. Ultimately, the scope of the material may be too great, and discussions of the Speculum's manuscript tradition or the Rose, for example, offer intelligent and provocative insight but would benefit from greater detail. The Speculum maius on its own poses enough of a challenge to readers, medieval and postmodern, even without the question of how its practices might be reworked by two writers as complex as Llull and Jean. Nevertheless, Franklin-Brown brings a huge amount of knowledge to bear and shows the importance of the Speculum for understanding their works, and vice versa.