Early development

The first fragments of an encyclopaedia to have survived are the work of Speusippus (died 339/338 BCE), a nephew of Plato’s. Speusippus conveyed his uncle’s ideas in a series of writings on natural history, mathematics, philosophy, and so forth. Aristotle’s wide-ranging lectures at the Lyceum were equally influential, and he and Plato appear to have been the originators of the encyclopaedia as a means of providing a comprehensive cultural background.

The Greek approach was to record the spoken word. The Romans, on the other hand, aimed to epitomize existing knowledge in readable form. Their first known effort is the Praecepta ad filium (“Advice to His Son”; c. 183 BCE), a series of letters (now lost) written by the Roman consul Marcus Porcius Cato (known as Cato the Censor) to his son. Cato’s intention was to provide a summary of useful information that could help in the process of living and in guiding and helping one’s fellow men. A more substantial attempt was made by the learned Latin writer Marcus Terentius Varro in his Disciplinarum libri IX (“Nine Books of Disciplines”), his Rerum divinarum et humanarum antiquitates (“The Antiquities of Things Divine and Human”), and his Imagines, which together covered the liberal arts, human efforts, the gods, and biographies of the Greeks and Romans.

The most important Roman contribution was the Historia naturalis of Pliny the Elder, a vast work constituting a kind of classified anthology of information. Although undiscriminating in its record of fact and fancy, it was nevertheless very influential; the Latin grammarian and writer Gaius Julius Solinus drew nearly 90 percent of his 3rd-century Collectanea rerum memorabilium (“Collection of Memorabilia”) from Pliny, and the Historia naturalis served as a major source for other encyclopaedias for at least the next 1,500 years. Even today it is still an important record for details of Roman sculpture and painting.

The statesman Cassiodorus, when he withdrew to the Vivarium in 551, dedicated this monastery to sacred and classical learning. His Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum (“Institutes of Divine and Secular Literature”) seems to have been designed to preserve knowledge in times that were largely inimical to it. In his encyclopaedia, Cassiodorus drew a clear distinction between the sacred and the profane, but the first Christian encyclopaedia to be compiled for the benefit of the newly converted Spanish population followed a different scheme. St. Isidore (c. 560–636) considered the liberal arts and secular learning to be the true basis of a Christian’s education. His Etymologiae therefore paid much attention to practical matters and even included an etymological dictionary. This was in line with the thought of St. Jerome—on whose encyclopaedic Chronicon and De viris illustribus St. Isidore had drawn—who, in common with the early Christian Fathers, was eager to provide a basis for a Christian interpretation and organization of knowledge. This concept was much later to be renewed by the Catalan ecclesiastic Ramon Llull.

The development of the encyclopaedia during the next 500 years, though of social interest, was undistinguished from the point of view of scholarship. Rabanus Maurus (c. 776–856), one of the English scholar Alcuin’s favourite pupils, compiled De universo (“On the Universe”), which, despite its being an unintelligent plagiarism of St. Isidore’s work, had a lasting popularity and influence throughout the medieval period. A series of encyclopaedias of special subjects—undistinguished anthologies of classical and Christian writings on history, jurisprudence, agriculture, medicine, veterinary surgery, and zoology—was organized by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (905–959). Michael Psellus (1018–96), a tutor of a later emperor, contributed a more interesting work, De omnifaria doctrina, in the form of questions and answers on both the humanities and science. At this time there was a growing influence on metropolitan and secular learning. In an attempt to counterbalance it, the brief but charming Didascalion of Hugh of Saint-Victor (c. 1096–1141), which paid much attention to practical matters as well as to the liberal arts, was soundly based on a profound classification of knowledge that influenced many later encyclopaedias. About this time an encyclopaedic dictionary known as Suda, or Suidas, broke with tradition by adopting alphabetical order for its contents. This had no effect on the plan of later encyclopaedias, but its contents included so much useful information that it has retained its importance as a source throughout the succeeding centuries.

The Liber floridus (c. 1120) of Lambert of Saint-Omer is an unoriginal miscellany, but it has an interest of its own in that it discards practical matters in favour of metaphysical discussion and pays special attention to such subjects as magic and astrology. The greatest achievement of the 12th century was the Imago mundi of Honorius Inclusus. Honorius produced his “mirror of the world” for Christian, later abbot of St. Jacob, and drew on a far wider range of authorities than any of his predecessors. The arrangement of the first section on geography, astrology, and astronomy was sound; it started with the creation and worked down to individual countries and cities. This was followed by a “chronicle,” and a third section provided a brief list of important events since the fall of Satan. Honorius accurately foresaw his book’s fate: innumerable copies, unauthorized plagiarisms, incessant criticism, and incompetent additions for at least 200 years.

Probably the first encyclopaedia to be compiled by a woman, the Hortus deliciarum of the abbess Herrad (died 1195), comprised a magnificent illuminated manuscript with 636 miniatures, intended to help and edify the nuns in her charge. Bartholomaeus Anglicus based his De proprietatibus rerum (1220–40) on the works of St. Isidore and Pliny. It was designed for ordinary people and became Europe’s most popular encyclopaedia for the next three centuries. But the outstanding achievement of the Middle Ages was the Speculum majus of Vincent of Beauvais. Vincent was not an original writer but he was industrious, and his work comprised nearly 10,000 chapters in 80 books; no encyclopaedia rivalled it in size until the middle of the 18th century. The work was very well balanced, almost equal space being allotted to the three sections. The “Naturale” dealt with God and man, the creation, and natural history. For this Vincent drew not only on Latin writings but also on Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew sources, which were at that time (through translations) making a very considerable impact on the thinking of the West. The “Doctrinale” covered practical matters as well as the scholastic heritage of the age. The “Historiale” included a summary of the first two sections and a history of the world from the creation to the times of St. Louis. A fourth section, “Morale,” based principally on St. Thomas Aquinas, was added after Vincent’s death. The influence of the Speculum majus was immediate and lasting. Translations were made into several languages, and complete reprints appeared as late as 1863–79. One of its many values is that it is a source for extracts from many documents of which no other parts have survived. Another is its detailed history of the second quarter of the 13th century.

Vincent’s was the last major work of its kind. Later encyclopaedists began to compile for a wider public than the very limited world of religious communities. The first breakaway from Latin came with Li livres dou trésor (“Treasure Books”) of Brunetto Latini (c. 1220–95), the master of Dante, and the Florentine poet and philosopher Guido Cavalcanti. Latini wanted to reach the mercantile and cultured classes of Italy; he therefore used French, their common language. The arrangement of his work was similar to Vincent’s but his approach was concise. The language, the brevity, and the accuracy of his encyclopaedia had an immediate and wide appeal. A friend of Petrarch’s, Pierre Bersuire, based his Reductorium, repertorium, et dictionarium morale utriusque testamenti (“Moral Abridgment, Catalogue, and Dictionary of Each Testament”; c. 1340) on Bartholomaeus’s De proprietatibus rerum. In contrast to Latini’s work, this was a return to the traditional, with its moralizings on the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and natural history, but it had a considerable success when printing was introduced, being issued 12 times by 1526.

One of the most delightful of all encyclopaedias is the little Margarita philosophica that Gregor Reisch (died 1525) wrote for young people. In some 200 pages he contrived to cover in a very pleasing style the whole university course of the day, both the trivium and the quadrivium. The arrival of humanism is reflected in the De disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives, a pioneer in psychology and philosophical method; Vives grounded all his arguments on nature and made no appeal to religious authority. With the writing of the anonymous Compendium philosophiae (c. 1300), the concept of the modern scientific encyclopaedia was reached at last. It was the first encyclopaedia to adopt an inquiring and impartial attitude to the things described, and the old wives’ tales that had filled so many pages of encyclopaedias from the time of Pliny onward were replaced by the latest scientific discoveries.

The first indigenous French encyclopaedia, the popular Dictionarium historicum, geographicum, et poeticum (“Historical, Geographical, and Poetic Dictionary”) of Charles Estienne (1504–64), was not published until 1553. For encyclopaedias in their own language, the French still had to rely on translations of the encyclopaedias of other nations, such as Les diverses leçons (“The Various Lessons”; 1552) of Pedro Mexia, a mediocre Spanish historian whose haphazard compilation was enormously popular in the 16th and 17th centuries.