Scholars of the Renaissance are by now comfortable grappling with the multifaceted impulses and applications of fifteenth-century humanism. We have similarly become well versed in the textual practices that developed to manage the information overload of the sixteenth century. The essays in this edited collection push us to engage deeply with how the concepts of the encyclopedia and encyclopedism were formative for the development of philology as a systematic field of study in this same period. The resulting volume is a history of philology in its most capacious sense, highlighting, as the title suggests, the curiosity and ambition of Renaissance humanists.
This book contains an introduction followed by eleven essays, which are close readings of complicated Renaissance texts with which many readers will be unfamiliar. In the introduction, the editors note that, as a concept, encyclopedism encompassed both an educational program and a cultural ideal (15). They then trace the history of the term encyclopedia (with its various orthographies) to its first early modern appearances, among circles of Roman humanists in the mid-fifteenth century. The first section of the book takes as its subject this Roman context. Clementina Marisco's essay about Lorenzo Valla's Elegantie Lingue Latine and the late Paola Tomè's discussion of Tortelli's Orthografia are an engaging pairing of two texts that we should see as related projects and that Valla and Tortelli discussed together. From words we move to objects with Anne Raffarin's account of Flavio Biondi's dictionary of antiquities, which is analyzed with careful reference to surviving correspondence. Raffarin issues a call for scholars to avoid the segmentation of Biondi's texts and sets an inspiring example of how to treat large, complex texts as whole entities.
The next set of essays turns to encyclopedism in Bologna. Loredana Chines examines the production of humanistic commentary and the important role of the interpreter in philological study. Andrea Severi's contribution analyzes Antonio (“Codro”) Urceo's satirical Sermo Primus to point out the emotional valences it ascribes to encyclopedism, which include both nostalgia for a past in which everything could be known and stress about a future concerned with trying to know everything. Annarita Angelini's account of Angelo Poliziano's Panepistemon describes how this text shifts emphasis from the encyclopedia, as a gathering of knowledge or an educational program, to the encyclopedist, who sought to learn and then apply knowledge that was useful for human society. W. Scott Blanchard's essay positions Poliziano's life and work in a humanist context that included interpersonal rivalry, in particular with Domizio Calderini, a student of Lorenzo Valla. Blanchard shows how Poliziano's works straddled “scholarship and inspiration” and “philology and poetic imagination” (328).
The final section of the volume is less tightly focused than the first two, combining sixteenth-century encyclopedism with the encyclopedism of Northern Europe (in this case represented by Erasmus of Rotterdam and Guillaume Budé). Dustin Mengelkoch engages with Giorgio Valla's monumental De Expetendis Rebus, which he argues was intended for physicians and sought to overcome the instability of medical knowledge and to improve skilled practice. The next two essays take Erasmus as their central character. Lorenzo M. Ciolfi examines Erasmus's relationship with Arsenius Apostolis in Venice and their evolving projects of collecting proverbs, while David Marsh positions Erasmus's Adagia as a cultural encyclopedia, exploring a number of Erasmus's explanations of completeness. The final essay, by Luigi-Alberto Sanchi, positions Guillaume Budé in familiar sharp contrast to Erasmus and argues that although the style of Budé's writing is neither “systematic nor encyclopaedic,” the content of his works strives for an “encyclopaedic horizon” (436, 448).
The essays in this volume will be of interest to philologists and to scholars of Neo-Latin literature, the history of humanism, and the changing knowledge practices of the European Renaissance. On the whole, they display an admirable degree of cohesion, building on each other clearly. In addition to the many points of intersection noted by the authors and editors, readers will notice repeated, though largely unexplored, connections between encyclopedism and libraries, which appear in quoted primary sources as both metaphors and real spaces. This volume is another happy reminder of how much we still have to learn about this exciting and important period of history and of how well equipped the scholarly community is to undertake this ongoing, perhaps even encyclopedic, enterprise.
