Based on the model of the Physiologus, with few exceptions, are the medieval bestiaries, herbals, and lapidaries, and the various imagines mundi, from the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville in the seventh century, to the many bestiaries and encyclopedias of the twelfth century, down to Cecco d’Ascoli’s thirteenth-century L’Acerba. All take Pliny as their point of departure and each incorporates the work of previous authors, offering therefore a fairly repetitive repertory of information.
As is the case with Pliny, it appears that the classificatory criteria of the medieval encyclopedias are rather vague (why does Isidore classify the crocodile with the fishes? merely because it lives in the water?) and that they too therefore represent a mere accumulation of haphazard information. Nevertheless, the only example of a fortuitous assemblage is that provided by the Physiologus, given that the animals the author lists (the lion, the sun-lizard, the pelican, the owl, the eagle, the phoenix, the hoopoe, the viper, the ant, the sirens, the hedgehog, the fox, the panther, the whale, etc.) appear to be chosen at random. Evidently, this bestiary was only interested in animals to which tradition had assigned properties that lent themselves to an allegorical and moral interpretation. If, however, we examine the tables of contents of many medieval encyclopedias we observe that the way they are put together is only superficially casual (cf. Binkley 1997 and especially Meier 1997).
Isidore considers the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, music, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy), followed by medicine, law, ecclesiastical books and offices, languages, peoples and armies, words, man, animals, the world, buildings, precious stones and metals, agriculture, wars, games, theater, ships, clothing, the home, and domestic chores—and one has to wonder what order lies behind a list of this kind, in which the entries dealing with animals are divided into Beasts, Small Animals, Serpents, Worms, Fish, Birds, and Small Winged Animals. But already in Isidore’s day primary education was subdivided into the Trivium and the Quadrivium, and Isidore dedicates his first books in fact to these subjects, throwing in medicine for good measure. The chapters that follow, devoted to ecclesiastical laws and offices, are included because he was also writing for the learned, that is, for jurists and monks. Immediately afterward, another order becomes apparent: book VII takes as its point of departure God, the angels, and the saints and goes on to deal with mankind, then with the animals, and, from book XIII on, we proceed to consider the world and its parts, winds, waters, and mountains. Finally, with book XV, we arrive at inanimate but man-made objects, that is, at the various trades and métiers. Thus, though he syncretistically juxtaposes two criteria, Isidore does not throw things together randomly, and in the second part he follows an order of decreasing dignity of creatures, from God down to domestic implements.
The De rerum naturis of Rabanus Maurus also appears to be inspired by a casual order but in fact juxtaposes several traditional orders: it begins by following the criterion of decreasing dignity, and accordingly, starting with God, we move on to man, to the animals, to inanimate things, arriving finally at man-made things such as buildings, then the various trades are discussed, probably in the same order in which they were taught in the Carolingian Palatine school, and from the professions we proceed to philosophers, languages, precious stones, weights and measures, agriculture, military matters, games and theater, painting and colors, and the various tools used in cooking or in tilling the fields.21
In the thirteenth century, in his De proprietatibus rerum, Bartholomaeus Anglicus begins with a mixed order, following both dignity (from the angels to man) and the six days of Creation (the hexameral order). He then goes back and begins all over again with an order that may seem bizarre to us but apparently wasn’t so for him, since he explains that, after speaking of the invisible world and of man, and dealing with the creation of the world and of time, he must now speak of the lesser things and of material creatures. And there follow the entries on air, birds, waters, mountains and regions, precious stones, herbs and animals, and finally various accidents like the senses, colors, sounds, scents, weights and measures, liquids. Bartholomaeus is respecting a philosophical order that is Aristotelian in origin, in that he speaks first of substances and then of accidents.
Furthermore, medieval readers must have perceived an order where we see only an accumulation of information, given that the organization of an encyclopedia also had a mnemonic role to play: a given order among things served to make them memorable, to remember the place they occupied in the image of the world (cf. Carruthers 1990 and Rivers 1997).
Little by little, the encyclopedias tend to make the order that governs them easier to follow: in the thirteenth century, Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum majus, with its 80 books divided into 9,885 chapters, already has the organization of a scholastic Summa. The Speculum naturale is inspired by a strictly hexameral criterion (the Creator, the sensible world, light, the firmament and the heavens, and so on, till we come to the animals, the formation of the human body and the story of mankind). The Speculum doctrinale treats of the human world and includes letters (philosophy, grammar, logic, rhetoric, poetics), morality, mechanics, and technical subjects, and, while the Speculum morale represents a sort of an ethical parenthesis (it is, incidentally, apocryphal), the Speculum historiale deals with human history or salvation history and has a chronological framework.
Order takes on a preponderant role, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with Raimon Llull’s Arbor scientiae (Tree of Science)—a veritable portrayal of the Great Chain of Being through a representation of the great chain of knowledge—from which burgeon the Arbor elementalis (objects of the sublunar world made up of the four elements: fire, air, water, and earth, with precious stones, trees, animals), the Arbor vegetalis, the Arbor sensualis, the Arbor imaginalis (the mental images that are the similes of the things represented in the other trees), the Arbor humanalis (memory, understanding, will, and the various arts and sciences), and then the Arbor moralis (virtues and vices), the Arbor imperialis (government), the Arbor apostolicalis (the Church), the Arbor caelestialis (astrology and astronomy), the Arbor angelicalis (angelology), the Arbor aeviternitalis (the Otherworld kingdoms), the Arbor maternalis (Mariology), the Arbor christianalis (Christology), the Arbor divinalis (Divine attributes), the Arbor exemplificalis (the contents of knowledge), the Arbor quaestionalis (40,000 questions on the various professions).
1.3.3. From the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century: Toward the Labyrinth
Some of Llull’s trees (the Arbor elementalis, for example) could still be interpreted as representations of the world and its parts, after the model of the Arbor Porphyriana. But, rather than a classification of reality, others suggest a classification of knowledge about reality. This is the bent that the Llullism of the humanists and the Renaissance will appear to take, in which more or less tree-like structures are designed to organize universal knowledge into “chapters.”22 What we have here is not a classification of substances and accidents, but the index of a possible encyclopedia and an attempt to propose an organization of knowledge—an organization so important to the encyclopedist that at times the proposal is limited to the metalinguistic project of organizing this knowledge, putting off its actual investigation till a later date.
The Margarita philosophica of Gregor Reisch (1503) is still conceived in a postmedieval spirit. In it, the author, after devising an arboriform index that appears as a schematic frontispiece designed to facilitate consultation, proceeds to “fill it in” with 600 pages of actual encyclopedic information. But often the index is proposed without filling in the blanks, as we see, for instance, in the case of Politian, whose 1491 Panepistemon is a meticulously structured summary under the aegis of Philosophy personified as mother of the arts or mater artium.
Under the influence of Llull, the Dialecticae institutiones (1543) and the Dialectique (1555) of Pierre de la Ramée (also known as Petrus Ramus) both propose a rigorous method for listing in order, without repetitions or omissions, all the branches of knowledge—and the project will be taken up again in the Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta of Johann Heinrich Alsted (1620). In the last case, starting with a series of Praecognita disciplinarum, we go on to the investigative tools (lexica, grammar, rhetoric, logic, oratory, and poetics) needed to confront the major questions addressed by so-called Theoretical Philosophy (metaphysics, pneumatics, physics, arithmetic, geometry, cosmography, uranometry, geography, optics, music), then on to Practical Philosophy (ethics, economics, politics, scholastics), arriving eventually at theology, jurisprudence, medicine, and the mechanical arts, as well as a hodgepodge of less well-organized disciplines (farragines disciplinarum) such as mnemonics, history, chronology, architectonics, down to issues like euthanasia, gymnastics, and tobaccology.
Here the index is at the very heart of the encyclopedic project, the bones and nerves, as it were, of the discipline (“quasi ossa et nervos disciplinarum”), while the purpose of the project is the form that the universe of knowledge is supposed to assume. As Tega (1999: 113) remarks, “we should not expect to find in the encyclopedia the body, blood and spirit of each single discipline, but only a form devoid of any concrete and particular content.” Alsted’s is thus “the idea of an encyclopedia
