All the Knowledge in the World: The Extraordinary History of the Encyclopaedia

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BACKSTORY

In 1964, the historian Robert Collison compiled a chronology of more than forty encyclopaedias that predated Britannica. Not all of these exist to be perused today, and not all are what we might recognise as encyclopaedias. A great many Latin works contained a varied display of intellectual artistry without holding to a recognised or ordered system, while others seemed unnecessarily ambitious. In 1245, for example, the French priest Gautier de Metz composed L’Image du Monde, laying claim to be the first encyclopaedia written in verse (it was part fact, part religious fantasy, with references to angels and dragons and a belief that the sky was made out of some sort of very early concrete).*

Collison’s list highlighted a diverse attempt at uniqueness – the first German encyclopaedia, the first encyclopaedia for women, the first encyclopaedia with a specifically Catholic view of the world – but they shared with Britannica a familiar intention: ‘The chief mirage that hovered tantalisingly before so many generations was that it was possible to compile a work that would supersede all other books and render them unnecessary.’

Collison claims that the first encyclopaedic work was written by the Greek philosopher Speusippus, Plato’s nephew, around 370 BCE, although later scholars question this.* It may be that the philosopher’s writings should be considered encyclopaedic in their scope, given that they covered such topics as mathematics, legislation and the gods, and that Speusippus believed that knowledge stemmed from the ability to understand not one thing alone, but one subject’s relationship to others. Perhaps Aristotle may stake the greatest claim to have studied matters so wide in variety that his knowledge may be justly classified encyclopaedic, no matter how unsystematic in form was the result. An encyclopaedia by Aristotle would surely be a thing to behold, his knowledge arranged perhaps into the strict taxonomic disciplines of metaphysics, ethics and poetics; alas, what we know of his mind was principally written down by students at his Lyceum, a university by all but name.

The first Roman encyclopaedia is sometimes named as Cato the Elder’s Praecepta ad Filium (Precepts to His Son), c.185 BCE, a collection of teachings derived from his speeches, although nothing of this survives in the original. But as great a case may be made for his encyclopaedic if particular De Agri Cultura (On the Cultivation of the Field), a ramshackle and exhaustive guide to agriculture and husbandry, combining the latest scientific practices with superstition, including much reverential consideration of asparagus and cabbage.*

Today, the oldest writing we may recognise as encyclopaedic is from Pliny the Elder. Begun not long before the eruption of Vesuvius in 77, and completed by his son after its author perished in its aftermath, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia runs to thirty-seven books, from astronomy to zoology, purposely monumental. Its author claimed that such a thing had never been attempted before, although he makes reference to those who had attempted less ambitious efforts, notably the medical reference work of Aulus Cornelius Celsus and the nine-volume illustrated guide to the liberal arts, Disciplinarum by Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BCE), which included meditations on grammar, rhetoric, geometry, astrology and music. Most significantly, and unlike Varro’s compilation, Pliny’s writing survived: it is known to us now as one of the most influential and earliest printed multi-volume works, first appearing in Venice in 1469.

Naturalis Historia was neither alphabetical nor cross-referenced, but it did have the sort of clearly defined contents page (the summarium) we may expect to see in efficient modern textbooks. It was consistently enthusiastic in tone: Pliny seemed to be in love with the entire world. The books encompassed geography and anthropology, botany and mineralogy, the cosmos and ‘Mother Earth’, olive and wine growing, mammals and insects, gemstones and dyes, sculpture and portraiture – ‘the world of nature,’ Pliny wrote, ‘or in other words life.’ In one sense it was the Great Library of Alexandria arrayed along a single shelf.

Pliny defined his intentions in his preface, a dedication to the future emperor Titus.

This is not a well-travelled path for most scholars, or one that minds are eager to wander. None of us has ever attempted it, and no one Greek has covered all of it. Most people look for attractive fields of research; those which are treated by others are said to be of immense subtlety, and are weighed down by the gloomy obscurity of the subject. Now all the subjects that the Greeks call

enkuklios paideia

ought to be dealt with but they are unknown or made confusing by over-complications, while others are so often discussed that they become tedious. It is a difficult thing to give novelty to the familiar, authority to the brand new, shine to the out-of-date, clarity to the obscure, charm to the dull, authority to the implausible, its nature to everything and all its own to nature. And this is why even if I have not succeeded, it is a brilliant and beautiful enterprise.

Pliny claimed to have studied around 2000 books by 100 authors, among them Catullus, Cicero, Livy and Virgil, resulting in some 20,000 digestible facts and observations (modern scholars suggest these numbers may have been greater still; he was either being modest or lost track). His nephew Pliny the Younger described him as a classical workaholic. Travelling through Rome, he would pay a companion to read to him as he walked. Having a bath – and more than one account describes him as a compulsive bather – he would dictate his latest entries, including this B-list of the healing properties of plants and fruits, nature in the service of man:

BRYA: The pounded bark is given for the spitting of blood and for excessive menstruation, also to sufferers from coeliac disease. The leaves … with honey added are applied to gangrenous sores. A decoction of them is healing to tooth-ache and ear-ache. The leaves furthermore are applied with pearl barley to spreading ulcers … it is applied with chicken fat to boils. It is an antidote also to the poison of serpents except that of the asp. They say that if it is mixed with the urine of a castrated ox and taken in either drink or food it is an aphrodisiac.

BRAMBLES: Nature did not create brambles for harmful purposes only, and so she has given them their blackberries, food even for men. They have a drying and astringent property, being very good for gums, tonsils and genitals. They counteract the venom of the most vicious serpents, such as the haemorrhois and prester; the bloom or the berry counteracts that of scorpions. They close wounds without any danger of gatherings. The same shoots, eaten by themselves like cabbage sprouts, or a decoction of them in a dry wine, strengthen loose teeth. They are dried in the shade and then burnt so that the ash may reduce a relaxed uvula.

BLACK HELLEBORE: A cure for paralysis, madness, dropsy without fever, chronic gout and diseases of the joints; it draws from the belly bile, phlegms and morbid fluids. For gently moving the bowels the maximum dose is one drachma; a moderate one is four oboli. It matures and clears up scrofulous sores, suppurations and indurations; fistulas also if it be taken off on the third day.*

Pliny hoped that all of educated Rome would benefit from his labours. He saw the path of learning as a moral expedition; similarly, we see how an encyclopaedia may reflect both the period in which it was written and the moral guidance of its compiler. With Naturalis Historia, Pliny was expressing his belief that man and nature existed in productive harmony, and he was concerned with what we might now call an ecological balance: neither half should be unregarding or unprotective of the other. He was also celebrating Rome as the learned centre of the universe (and defiantly Rome rather than Athens). He lived at a time of immense cultural and scientific confidence; knowledge, be it of the practical advances in mining or the orbital timings of the planets, was amassed and conquered in step with the conquests of the empire. Indeed, this was another encyclopaedic goal: a sense of all being well with the world, a notion of order and stillness, perhaps even control. If you wrote it so, it would be so; nothing confirmed mastery in this eternal city as much as carved or written text. With this extended manuscript, everything seemed in one’s command, the sun moving sublimely around the earth, Vesuvius unthreatening in the distance.*

BISHOP OF SEVILLE

If Pliny ever wondered how his text would be remembered, he would have gazed with satisfaction at the work of Isidore of Seville. Some seven centuries later, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia would continue to form a cornerstone of learning in early medieval Europe, and thanks to Isidore’s Etymologiae (600–25 CE) it would remain influential throughout the Renaissance.

Matters both human and divine: Isidore of Seville considers his Origins

And we have further reason to be grateful to Bishop Isidore of Seville. In 2018, the English Historical Review called him ‘the patron saint of the Internet’. Shortly after Isidore’s death in 636, his pupil Braulio of Saragossa would remember ‘an excellent man … educated in every kind of expression, so that in the quality of his speech he was suited to both the ignorant audience and the learned.’

Isidore produced an extravagant spread of reference works – books which catalogued the saints, analysed the Scriptures, described each office of the Church and explained all current interpretations of the elements. Accordingly, Braulio claimed, we may fittingly apply Cicero’s comment,

Your books have brought us back, as if to our home, when we were roving and wandering in our own city like strangers, so that we might sometimes be able to understand who and where we are. You have laid open the lifetime of our country, the description of the ages, the laws of sacred matters and of priests, learning both domestic and public, the names, kinds, functions and causes of settlements, regions, places, and all matters both human and divine.

We know relatively little about his life. He was born in the middle of the sixth century, with Spain under Germanic Visigothic rule. His Catholic bishopric began in 600, and his close relationship with King Sisebut enabled him to follow both an influential political career and a humanist religious path. Etymologiae (sometimes called Origins) was composed in his scriptorium (writing house) and intended as ‘a grand tour of civilisation, starting with an outline of the formal curriculum of the ancient classroom and ending with a helter-skelter of mundane details about the objects to be found in a Roman garden or stable’. It was that standard thing – a compendium of all knowledge in the known world. But its author never meant it as a reference work, and certainly not something to be dipped into in search of a single fact.*

After Isidore’s death Etymologiae was divided by his pupil Braulio into twenty books, and the table of contents alone may leave us overawed, for here were the most important things in life:

Grammar and its parts.

Rhetoric and dialectic.

Mathematics, whose parts are arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy.

Medicine.

Laws and the instruments of the judiciary, and times.

The order of Scripture, cycles and canons, liturgical feasts and offices.

God and angels, prophetic nomenclature, names of the holy fathers, martyrs, clerics, monks, and other names.

Church and synagogue, religion and faith, heresies, philosophers, poets, sibyls, magicians, pagans, gods of the gentiles.

Languages of the nations, royal, military, and civic terminology, family relationships.

Certain terms in alphabetical order.

Human beings and their parts, the ages of humans, portents and metamorphoses.

Four-footed animals, creeping animals, fish, and flying animals.

Elements, that is, the heavens and the air, waters, the sea, rivers and floods.

Earth, paradise, the regions of the whole globe, islands, mountains, other terms for places, and the lower regions of the earth.

Cities, urban and rural buildings, fields, boundaries and measures of fields, roads.

Earthy materials from land or water, every kind of gem and precious and base stones, ivory likewise, treated along with marble, glass, all the metals, weights and measures.

Agriculture, crops of every kind, vines and trees of every kind, herbs and all vegetables.

Wars and triumphs and the instruments of war, the Forum, spectacles, games of chance and ball games.

Ships, ropes, and nets, iron workers, the construction of walls and all the implements of building, also wool-working, ornaments, and all kinds of clothing.

Tables, foodstuffs, drink, and their vessels, vessels for wine, water, and oil, vessels of cooks, bakers, and lamps, beds, chairs, vehicles, rural and garden implements, equestrian equipment.

And then there were the subheads. To take just Book 1 (Grammar), we encounter Discipline and art; The common letters of the alphabet; The Latin letters; The parts of speech; Accents; Signs used in law; Epistolary codes; Schemas; Tropes; Meters.

In an introduction to the first full English version in 2006, the translators select several bits of amusing and unreliable lore from each of the books, asides that may have caused a seventh-century Irish monk or an Italian poet from the thirteenth century to look up briefly from their work and wonder about the man who compiled them.*

From Book 1: Caesar Augustus used a secret (although hardly unbreakable) code in which he replaced each letter with the following letter of the alphabet, b for a, etc.

Book 3: The term ‘cymbal’ derives from the Greek words for ‘with’ and ‘dancing’.

Book 6: Architects use green Carystean marble to panel libraries, because the green refreshes weary eyes.

Book 11: In the womb, the knees (genua) of the foetus are pressed against the face, and help to form the eye-sockets (genae).

Book 12: The ibis purges itself by spewing water into its anus with its beak.

Book 20: Wine (vinum) is so called because it replenishes the veins (vena) with blood.

And what of the title itself? Isidore was deeply interested in origin stories, of philosophies and disciplines, not least rhetoric and physics. And he was fascinated by the regions where things (metals, spices, birds) were first identified.

Pliny was not Isidore’s only source. He found much to reproduce from the writings of Servius, Donatus, Palladius and Nonius Marcellus, as well as the Christian writers Jerome and Augustine. Unlike Pliny, Isidore’s work for the Church precluded him from conducting much research of his own; he didn’t travel much, and there are scant original narrative observations of the sort found in Tacitus. His work was an abridgement and a bridge, a link between late antiquity and medieval Christian scholarship, between the Greek and Roman Empires and those of the pagans and Visigoths. Isidore had a term for his method, something he considered a viable new trade: ‘compilator’. He defined this as ‘one who mixes the words of others with his own, just as those making pigments crush many different [colours] in the mortar.’ He also saw himself as a gardener, selecting textual ‘flowers’ as he went.

Consulting Etymologiae today we may revel in that combination of pleasures an old encyclopaedia never fails to provide – illumination, bafflement and the invaluable impression of an age. Within Isidore’s orchard we find:

BIRDS: There is a single word for birds, but various kinds, for just as they differ among themselves in appearance, so do they differ also in the diversity of their natures. Some are simple, like the dove, and others clever, like the partridge; some enjoy the company of humans, like the swallow, while others prefer a secluded life in deserted places, like the turtledove … Some make a racket with their calls, like the swallow. Some produce the sweetest songs, like the swan and the blackbird, while others imitate the speech and voices of humans, like the parrot and the magpie. But there are innumerable others differing in kind and behaviour, for no one can discover how many kinds of birds there are.

BRONZE: The ancients used bronze before they used iron. Indeed, at first they would plow the earth with bronze; with bronze weapons they would wage war; and bronze was more prized, while gold and silver were rejected as useless. Now, according to Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things, it is the opposite: ‘Bronze is despised and gold has attained the highest honor: thus time in its turning changes the positions of things, and what was prized becomes finally without value.’

BALL GAMES: A ball (pila) is properly so called because it is stuffed with hair (pilus). It is also a ‘sphere’ (sphera), so called from ‘carrying’ (ferre) or ‘striking’ (ferire). Among the types of ball games are ‘trigon-ball’ (trigonaria) and ‘arena-ball’ (arenata). Arena-ball, which is played in a group, when, as the ball is thrown in from the circle of bystanders and spectators, they would catch it beyond a set distance and begin the game. They call it the ‘elbow-game’ (cubitalis) when two people at close quarters and with their elbows almost joined strike the ball. Those who pass the ball to their fellow players by striking it with the out-stretched lower leg are said to ‘give it the calf’ (suram dare).

The influence of Etymologiae was wide, informing all the cultural centres of Europe before the Enlightenment. Almost 1000 manuscript copies survive, and it was among the earliest texts to have benefitted from Gutenberg’s printing press. Bede referred to Etymologiae extensively, and its author was immortalised more than 500 years later by Dante, whose Divine Comedy (c.1320) concludes with the dancing souls of solar illumination: ‘See, flaming beyond, the burning spirit of Isidore.’

Isidore had once found a little time for his own poetry. Although its authorship has been disputed, he is believed to have composed several verses outlining his general philosophy of learning, perhaps even of life itself. Reading the lines below, one may imagine him looking around a cathedral library at Seville, or possibly a monastery scriptorium, surrounded by other learned men, intoxicated by the volumes stacked high upon the walls.

These bookcases of ours hold a great many books. Behold and read, you who so desire, if you wish.

Here lay your sluggishness aside, put off your fastidiousness of mind.

Believe me, brother, you will return thence a more learned man.

But perhaps you say, ‘Why do I need this now?

For I would think no study still remains for me:

I have unrolled histories and hurried through all the law.’

Truly, if you say this, then you yourself still know nothing.

BYZANTIUM

What a falling off was there. The relatively barren centuries between Isidore of Seville and the High Middle Ages were necessarily as hazardous towards the notion of encyclopaedias as towards all other secular manuscripts, but our lack of cultural records in this period suggests that because nothing survived therefore nothing existed. What did survive was curiosity and desire, not least the desire to gather and interpret, and we must locate this innate human attribute in other places and forms.

Byzantine culture, declares the Byzantine professor Paul Magdalino, ‘was permanently encyclopaedic in the sense that it was continually collecting, summarising, excerpting and synthesising’. Much of its Orthodox Christian output was a textual collation composed by kings for their heirs, and tutors for their pupils, and although the ninth and tenth centuries produced nothing of a cohesive nature that could be compared to Pliny or Isidore, it did construct plenty of moral and specialised compendiums.*

Our appreciation of these works requires a parallel effort of encyclopaedism, bringing together the surviving excerpts of diverse works commissioned by Leo VI, Constantine VII and Basil II, a list covering law, ecclesiastical teachings and general history.

Emperor Leo VI the Wise (866–912) ruled from Constantinople, and if ever a medieval empire could be said to be sprawling, this was the one: his kingdom, the eastern half of the Roman Empire, extended from the shores of the Bosporus to cover much of the land surrounding the Mediterranean, including what is now Italy, Greece, North Africa and the Middle East, extending north to the Danube and east to Syria. But in the Macedonian Dynasty in which Leo governed, the empire was under constant attack (from Bulgarian and Arab armies; from maritime fleets capturing Sicily and Crete) and his military talents were not equal to his literary and scholarly ones. Indeed, his written histories and treatises may have reflected a desire to instil some sort of order to his kingdom in such a persistent period of turmoil. Leo VI earned his moniker the Wise (he was also called the Philosopher): he attempted to codify all Byzantine law and trading regulations, and his poetry spoke of oracles and visions of the future.

The emperor married four times, in the face of much Church opposition. His illegitimate heir Constantine VII inherited his father’s scholarly zeal, and his writing benefitted greatly from his father’s preparatory work. The finest example, and the one we may classify as encyclopaedic, is now known as the Constantinian Excerpts, a large historical survey sourced from the ancient Greeks Herodotus and Thucydides, through Peter the Patrician (born 500 CE), to George the Monk (ninth century CE). Written in Greek and arranged originally into fifty-three volumes, each with the same preface explaining the intention of the writing that followed: to render historical information both more intelligible and accessible. Composed between 900 and 990, the project was thematic rather than chronological, utilising at least twenty-six credited histories at no little expense: some 10,000 sheep had to be slaughtered and skinned to supply the parchment.*

The emperor and his proudly studious colleagues produced much else of an encyclopaedic nature, not least a history of the empire from 817, the exhaustive agricultural manual Geoponika (with tips on how to grow flowers and plough a turnip field) and De Ceremoniis, a guide to court ceremonies and rituals. The concept of cohesive and comprehensive learning was something young Byzantine students learnt at school: the curriculum, consisting mainly of grammar, rhetoric, philosophy and history was indeed called ‘enkyklios paideia’.

The Dark Ages that fell upon Western Europe since the fall of Rome, with Church indoctrination all but eliminating the teachings of classical antiquity, was resisted in the East; in the loosest sense, the Barbarians at the gates were fended off as much with ancient Roman statuary and a belief in the retention of intellectual civilisation as they were with swords and spears. It is likely that Constantine’s historical encyclopaedia was completed by Emperor Basil II some twenty years later around 990, and in this way did the imperial scribes safeguard and promote much of the knowledge that would resurface in the early Renaissance printing press of the fifteenth century.

* Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout the Ages by Robert Collison (Hafner, New York, 1964).

* See for example Jason König and Greg Woolf (eds) Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

* We do have an account of Cato’s teachings from Pliny, a report of a lecture to his son on the untrustworthiness of his rival Greeks. ‘They are a worthless and unruly tribe. Take this as a prophecy: when those people give us their writings they will corrupt everything … They call us barbarians too, of course …’

* This is but a small sample: an edited summary from books 24 and 25, Loeb Classical Library edition, Harvard University Press, translated by H. Rackham, first published 1952.

* Pliny’s manuscript was reproduced many times, and more than 200 handwritten copies survive. It was no less popular by the time of the printing press: at the end of the fifteenth century there were fifteen different printed editions.

* Then as now, humanism was a term open to interpretation. Isidore’s theology included a book called Against the Jews, an argument designed to convert Jews to Catholicism, which included much criticism of Jewish rituals.

* Translated by Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach and Oliver Berghof et al. (Cambridge University Press, 2006) from the 1911 Oxford Latin version of the text by W.M. Lindsay.

* In Jason König and Greg Woolf (eds) Encyclopedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2013).

* The estimation of András Németh, The Imperial Systemisation of the Past in Constantinople (in König and Woolf, above). Of the fifty-three volumes, only On Embassies survives in its entirety, alongside fragments of On Virtues and Vices, On Ambushes and On Gnomic Statements.