Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance

1. Introduction: Jason König and Greg Woolf
Part I. Classical Encyclopaedism:
2. Encyclopaedism in the Roman Empire Jason König and Greg Woolf
3. Encyclopaedism in the Alexandrian Library Myrto Hatzimichali
4. Labores pro bono publico: the burdensome mission of Pliny's Natural History Mary Beagon
5. Encyclopaedias of virtue? Collections of sayings and stories about wise men in Greek Teresa Morgan
6. Plutarch's corpus of Quaestiones in the tradition of imperial Greek encyclopaedism Katerina Oikonomopoulou
7. Artemidorus' Oneirocritica as fragmentary encyclopaedia Daniel Harris-McCoy
8. Encyclopaedias and autocracy: Justinian's Encyclopaedia of Roman law Jill Harries
9. Late Latin encyclopaedism: towards a new paradigm of practical knowledge Marco Formisano
Part II. Medieval Encyclopaedism:
10. Byzantine encyclopaedism of the ninth and tenth centuries Paul Magdalino
11. The imperial systematisation of the past in Constantinople: Constantine VII and his Historical Excerpts András Németh
12. Ad maiorem Dei gloriam: Joseph Rhakendytès' synopsis of Byzantine learning Erika Gielen
13. Shifting horizons: the medieval compilation of knowledge as mirror of a changing world Elizabeth Keen
14. Isidore's Etymologies: on words and things Andrew Merrills
15. Loose Giblets: encyclopaedic sensibilities of ordinatio and compilatio in later medieval English literary culture and the sad case of Reginald Pecock Ian Johnson
16. Why was the fourteenth century a century of Arabic encyclopaedism? Elias Muhanna
17. Opening up a world of knowledge: Mamluk encyclopaedias and their readers Maaike van Berkel
Part III. Renaissance Encyclopaedism:
18. Revisiting Renaissance encyclopaedism Ann Blair
19. Philosophy and the Renaissance encyclopaedia: some observations D. C. Andersson
20. Reading 'Pliny's Ape' in the Renaissance: the Polyhistor of Caius Julius Solinus in the first century of print Paul Dover
21. Shakespeare's encyclopaedias Neil Rhodes
22. Big Dig: Dugdale's drainage and the dregs of England History of Embanking and Drayning Claire Preston
23. Irony and encyclopedic writing before (and after) the Enlightenment William West
Part IV. Chinese Encyclopaedism: A Postscript:
24. The passion to collect, select, and protect: fifteen hundred years of the Chinese encyclopaedia Harriet Zurndorfer.

ason König is Senior Lecturer in Greek at the University of St Andrews, working broadly on the Greek literature and culture of the Roman Empire. He is author of Athletics and Literature in the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005) and Saints and Symposiasts: The Literature of Food and the Symposium in Greco-Roman and Early Christian Culture (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and he is editor, jointly with Tim Whitmarsh, of Ordering Knowledge in the Roman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2007).

Greg Woolf is Director of the Institute of Classical Studies at the School of Advanced Study, University of London. Formerly Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews, he has held visiting appointments in France, Germany, Italy, and Brazil, and he has lectured widely around the world. He has published research on a wide range of topics in ancient history and Roman archaeology, including ancient literacy, European prehistory, the Roman economy, and ancient patronage. He maintains an interest in the comparative historical sociology of ancient empires. More recently he has been working on ancient science, in particularly ethnography, and on Roman religion, and he was awarded a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, for a project on the origins of religious pluralism. His previous publications include Et tu Brute? The murder of Caesar and political assassination (2006) and The Life and Death of Ancient Cities (2020).