Renaissance Encyclopaedism: Studies in Curiosity and Ambition ed. by W. Scott Blanchard, and Andrea Severi (review)

In this volume, the editors have compiled a series of essays that examine encyclopaedic practice in the context of a Renaissance 'mentality [that] is situated somewhere in the interstices that lie between modern rationalism and pre-modern anthropocentrism' (p. 14). While the editors suggest that the Renaissance itself produced very few encyclopaedias in the modern sense of the term (p. 15), the focus of the volume is on encyclopaedism, rather than encyclopaedias per se. In this vein, many of the contributions explore the notion of Renaissance encyclopaedic practice as a precursor to the famous early modern encyclopaedias of Diderot and others.

Drawing on a modern concept of an encyclopaedia as a reference work with various identifiable features such as an index or indices, claims or aspirations to comprehensive knowledge, a system of headings and explications, and the rational presentation of facts supported by evidence and citations, the contributions in this volume seek to illustrate how Renaissance scholars deployed these tools in their own writing. In her essay on Lorenzo Valla's Elegantie lingue latine, for example, Clementina Marsico considers how the 'wealth of the accumulated data […] imbues the text with a truly encyclopaedic character' (p. 62), while Anne Raffarin considers Flavio Biondo's collection and presentation of antiquitates and the 'encyclopaedic nature of the quantity of information he produced and the global nature of his enterprise of "restoring" antiquity' (p. 160). Andrea Severi's contribution uses Antonio (Codro) Urceo's work to illustrate a clear path from scholasticism to humanism as a stepping stone to modern rationality, while Dustin Mengelkoch shows us how Giorgio Valla crafted his De expetendis et fugiendis rebus opus as an essential and practical reference work for the Renaissance physician.

By closely examining the construct, content, and context of various Renaissance scholars' works, primarily in the Italian peninsula, the essays in this volume illustrate the emergence and evolution of Renaissance encyclopaedic practice, assisting the reader to, as the editors suggest, 'acquire an understanding of the mind of the Renaissance humanist, to recover a mentality that helped shape and reorient the approach and attitudes towards knowledge in subsequent centuries' (p. 23). While this end is achieved, it is not without some effort on behalf of the reader. Several essays would have benefited from clearer signposting to assist the reader to understand their arguments, and to draw the connections required to map this emergence and evolution. Some of the authors also adopt quite a detailed, micro-analytical approach, which makes it difficult for a nonspecialist to relate the works under examination to the broader environment of Renaissance scholarship, particularly the important contemporaneous political context and systems of patronage.

The editors have also taken the somewhat unorthodox decision not to include a precis of each essay, or even each part of the volume, in their introduction, and this reinforces the inaccessibility of some of the contributions. A brief gloss on each chapter and its place in the context of the broader volume would have been a welcome addition. Nevertheless, the introduction is a substantial and valuable essay in its own right, charting the (re)emergence of the term enkyklios paideia in the mid-fifteenth century and its use and evolution in the ensuing decades. This provides a useful reference point for subsequent chapters, and several contributors draw on the editors' discussions of the term's original propaedeutic connotations, the humanists' 'discovery' of the term in Quintilian and Pliny the Elder, the introduction of the neo-Latin neologism encyclopaedia in 1490, and an associated semantic shift away from the idea of an encyclopaedia as an educational curriculum and towards the encyclopaedia as a literary composition.

While individual chapters are likely to be of more value to readers with a specialist interest in encyclopaedic practice, the volume does, taken as a whole, provide valuable insights into the...