Blair, Ann (Author)
The ‘encyclopedia’ was not a clearly defined genre before the eighteenth century. A wide range of works of the late Renaissance have been considered encyclopedic, by historians and by authors at the time (for example in the list of antecedents cited by Johann Heinrich Alsted in his Encyclopedia of 1630). I focus on their variability in size, from short books offering definitions and diagrams of the disciplines to huge compilations of material. The former touted their orderly and methodical approach; the latter sought to offer something for everyone, often without an effective ordering system, but with an alphabetical index instead. Whereas brevity has been identified as the dominant literary virtue in the Middle Ages, learned books were typically valued for their length in the early modern period, thanks in part to the commercial benefits that some printers associated with them and to the new humanist admiration for copia. Authors of large encyclopedic works emphasized their goal of striking a balance between being too brief (at the risk of being misleading or incomplete) and too prolix (at the risk of being tedious, as exemplified in their discussions by the late medieval theologian Thomas Haselbach).
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