Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age

Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age

Language: English

Pages: 416

ISBN: 0300165390

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


'Too Much To Know' examines methods of information management in ancient and medieval Europe as well as the Islamic world and China, focusing on the organization, composition, and reception of Latin reference books in print in early modern Europe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

a successful compilation for printer and compiler. But compilers and printers also harbored ambitions to serve and acquire reputation in the Republic of Letters, as Zwinger and Oporinus visibly did. The extraordinary labors involved in such work often stemmed from multiple motivations and justifications. METHODS OF COMPILING A regular refrain in the front matter to compilations was the great labor involved, particularly as the compilations became larger. Erasmus set the parameters for

for whom they were often designed: “Those who read the unsewn patches [pièces décousues] in these large repertories cannot know the purpose of the original authors, and it is hard that they not misuse the bits against the use for which they were intended. … Which should cause us aversion to these large compilations that we have under the name of ‘Theater of Life,’ ‘Polyanthea,’ ‘Garden of orators’ and a number of others whose pretty titles serve only to impress us.”101 For Baillet, the most

Literatur des römischen-kanonischen Rechts in Deutschland. Leipzig: G. Hirzel. Stoneman, William, 1994. “Georg Sparsgüt, Rubricator.” Princeton University Library Chronicle 55 (2): 323–28. ———, ed. 1999. Dover Priory. Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues. London: British Library in association with the British Academy. Strada, Annalisa, and Gianluigi Spini. 1994. Ambrogio da Calepio, “il Calepino.” Trescore Balneario, Bergamo: Editrice San Marco. Strauss, Gerald. 1965.

portrayed scholars as working alone, in the presence of books and antiquities or symbolic animals. Insofar as we tend to project our own working methods backwards, we too envision scholarship and note-taking in particular as silent, solitary activities.170 But in recent decades historians have looked beyond these representations and self-representations and brought to light the many kinds of help on which early modern scholars relied—from those they considered to be social or intellectual

development of reference books in two ways: printed compilations typically originated in the collections of personal notes of one or more compilers, and they offered ready-made in print the kinds of notes readers wished to have available even if they had not taken them themselves. The accumulation of manuscript notes posed problems of management, collaboration, and sharing that also characterize printed compilations. In chapter 3, I survey the nonspecialist Latin reference genres in print between

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