Person:

Blair, Ann

Like the special issue of 2007 (Archival Science 7:4, “Toward a Cultural History of Archives”), “In and Out of the Archives” showcases recent work by historians on the formation, organization and use of archives. The papers contained in this issue seek to shed new light on a range of historical concerns, including the origins of modern attitudes toward documents and the ideals and tools of governance devised by states and institutions during crucial phases of their development. With its focus on archiving and archival documents in various European contexts from roughly 1400 to 1700, the research here examines a period well known for the growth of bureaucracies and the consolidation of powers of government, whether in city-states, principalities or nations, often in conjunction with concurrent imperial expansion, religious confessionalization and war. In each of the cases studied (in Venice and cities in Switzerland, Flanders and Germany, in England and Spain, in the Jesuit order and in the Catholic and Protestant principalities of Northwest Germany), archives were formed or transformed during this period, as a result of (among other factors) practical pressures like the rapid accumulation of documents, a heightened awareness of the risk of loss, and political ambitions to consolidate power through the collection, control and use of documents.

The Renaissance has long been associated with ‘encyclopedism’ primarily for two different reasons which are not directly related to one another. On the hand the term was first coined in the late fifteenth century, though without many of connotations we associate with the term today, to designate an ideal of learning which spanned and highlighted the relations between many disciplines. On the other hand many Renaissance writings, from compilations in various fields to novels and poetry, are considered encyclopedic today because of their large bulk and/or their ideal of exhaustive and multidisciplinary scope. Only occasionally did early modern authors apply the term ‘encyclopedia’ to what we consider their encyclopedic compiling activities, but by the late seventeenth century a handful of works had begun to forge the connection between the term and a kind of reference book. The success of Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopedia (1710) and Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751) established the ‘encyclopedia’ as a title of a genre which was imitated faddishly throughout the eighteenth century and which has been going strong ever since. My main interest in this essay is to ponder the intellectual foundations of the encyclopedic ambitions of large-scale compilers in the Renaissance—what was new about Renaissance encyclopedism and what motivated these innovations—while attending to the gradual convergence between the term ‘encyclopedia’ and our concept of encyclopedism.

Critique in some form has no doubt played a role in intellectual activity since before we have written sources to document it. Exchange is at the heart of intellectual creativity. But the circumstances, media, and norms for successful critique have varied considerably by historical context and within the same context among different kinds of authors, fields and genres of work, and target audiences. In antiquity, for example, authors like Virgil read or recited their work to audiences of friends and family to gather feedback before making a written version on a papyrus roll available for copying and distribution, i.e. publication. In medieval universities the disputation was the centerpiece of the scholastic method. Today (thanks to the polemical representations of the humanists) we mostly associate the term with a sterile pedagogical exercise that perdured into the eighteenth century and an opportunity for professors to display their prowess by arguing against one another on abstruse topics. But at their origins the disputations were “a form of collective research with colleagues about real and much discussed problems for which nobody had a ready answer” —in other words, an opportunity for constructive critique. In each of these contexts critique no doubt took other forms as well, but the evidence we have is often limited. It is especially difficult to reconstruct the conventions of critique in a given context because these have rarely been discussed explicitly, even today—hence the special interest of this unique Forum. Happily I have found a good number of thoughtful recent discussions of the nature and norms of various kinds of critical interactions in early modern Europe. New ideals of moderation in scholarly discussions clashed with new opportunities (afforded by various printed genres in particular) to bring disputes to the attention of a wider public, generating many different patterns of behavior.

Why does red hair turn white sooner than other hair? Why does a man yawn when he sees another yawn? Why is it a good custom to eat cheese after dinner? Why is there such delight in the act of venery? Why do birds not piss? These and some 380 other questions, divided into 34 topical sections and complete with causal explanations, circulated widely in over one hundred editions in early modern Europe, under the title (and its vernacular equivalents) of "Problemata Aristotelis ac philosophorum medicorumque complurium." As I have argued elsewhere, this text is the most popular (both in the kind and in the size of its circulation) in what can be identified as a long-lived natural philosophical genre imitated from ancient models attributed to Aristotle and Alexander of Aphrodisias and that consisted in a collection of causal questions and answers, mostly about natural and medical topics. Despite its having been confused with the ancient pseudo-Aristotelian problems, perhaps in its own day and certainly since, these "problemata Aristotelis" have nothing in common with the 900-odd problems found in classical editions of Aristotle's Problems beyond the form of the "problema" and the short title that they share. These problems were composed anonymously in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries and circulated in manuscript before being more widely diffused through print. Following Brian Lawn, who first discussed this text as a separate work, I will also designate it by its incipit: "Omnes homines," from the Aristotelian tag "all men naturally desire to know" with which its preface begins.

Reading, compiling and commenting on texts long constituted one of the central practices of natural philosophy, from antiquity down to at least the late 17th century. From Pliny to Ulisse Aldrovandi to Johann Jonston, from Aristotle to Roger Bacon to the professors of philosophy in 17th century universities, to do natural philosophy was in large part to gather, sort and critique causal explanations, reports of observations and philosophical opinions proffered by one's predecessors; the texts that were generated in the process would in turn fuel the discussions of future generations of natural philosophers. In the Renaissance this self-perpetuating cycle of textual commentary faced a massive increase in the range and number of relevant books to be read. The humanist program of recovering lost ancient works made available for the first time in a millennium a number of works on natural topics, including those of Dioscorides, Lucretius, Archimedes, among others.i At the same time, travel to the new world as well as to exotic parts of the "old world" yielded new accounts of flora and fauna and human customs. Finally, the new technology of printing made more readily accessible in a wide range of editions, from the bulky editiones principes and opera omnia to vernacular translations or cheap school editions of single works, not only this new material, but also the well-known ancient and medieval authorities still held in high esteem. Printing also fueled the composition of works by an ever-increasing number of modern authors, many of whom would not have had the university or courtly connections to reach any significant diffusion in manuscript.

This article surveys some of the ways in which early modern scholars responded to what they perceived as an overabundance of books. In addition to owning more books and applying selective judgment as well as renewed diligence to their reading and note-taking, scholars devised shortcuts, sometimes based on medieval antecedents. These shortcuts included the use of the alphabetical index, whether printed or handmade, to read a book in parts, and the use of reference books, amanuenses, abbreviations, or the cutting and pasting from printed or manuscript sources to save time and effort in note-taking.

C. P. Snow's conception of "two cultures" has been readily applied to modern European and especially Anglo-American contexts and used to bemoan the negative impact of disciplinary distinctions. But in the pre-modern period, disciplinary distinctions prevailed along different fault lines. I consider two examples of the dynamics between the disciplines in medieval and early modern Europe to argue that distinctions between the disciplines can foster crucial benefits along with the tensions and obstacles to interdisciplinarity of which we are more often aware. In the medieval university the institutional and intellectual separation between philosophy and theology gave the former an important measure of protection and independence from the cultural dominance of the latter. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the long-traditional distinction between mathematical disciplines and Aristotelian physics was gradually abandoned, and distinctions akin to those Snow identified were first commented on during the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns (c. 1687).