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READING THE WORLD
Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age
By MARY FRANKLIN-BROWN
The University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-26068-6
Chapter One
The Book of the World Encyclopedism and Scholastic Ways of Knowing
Toward the middle of Ramon Llull's Libre de meravelles (Paris, ca. 1288–89), an odd text that weds the encyclopedic genre with the quest romance, there is a parable about another, more conventional encyclopedia, the Libre de plasent visió. According to the story, a wise king one day receives, from the hands of a visiting squire, a book compiled by an unnamed hermit, "on eren depintes moltes figures e estòries" [where many figures and histories were depicted]. The book is described in a rich passage that must be quoted at length:
Lo donzell dix al rei que lo libre és de plaser corporal e espirital: "De plaser corporal és, per go car hi ha moltes e diverses figures, qui són molt noblament feites, e són de totes aitantes maneres com hom pot pensar de criatures e de obres de criatures.... E aixi, per orde, en cascuna cosa distinta de altra, ha sa figura, e la manera segons que los hòmens, e les bisties, e aucells, e peixs viuen e fan en aquest món obres per tal que viuen. En aquest libre ha estòries de batalles, de ciutats e naus e galees, reis; e de totes altres coses antigues que són passades, fa aquest libre memòria per figures. Aquest libre, sényer rei," dix lo donzell, "féu aquest sant ermità, qui fo filòsof; e de tots los libres que poc atrobar, ell trasc totes les històries que poc trer; e de tot go que veia fer als hòmens e a les bisties e aucells, arbres e peixs, ell ho posava en figures.
"Sènyer rei," dix lo donzell, "con lo filòsof hac fet aquest libre, ell se'n venc estar en una esgleia ermitana, e en aquest libre ell guardava tot jorn, per ço que n'hagués plaer corporalment e espirital: plaser corporal ne havia, per co car lo libre és bell, e ben pintat e afigurat, e car de moltes figures és ajustat; plaser espirital ne havia, per co car, per co que veia ab ulls corporals, se girava a veser ab ulls esperitals, ab los quals veia Déu e les obres que havia en les criatures; e havia plaser de co que considerava en les coses passades, e en les obres que fan les criatures." (8.57)
[The squire told the king that the book was about physical and spiritual pleasure: "It concerns physical pleasure because it contains many and diverse figures, which are very nobly fashioned, and they are of all manners that one can imagine creatures and the works of creatures.... And thus, in order, for each thing distinct from any other, there may be found its figure and the manner in which men and beasts and birds and fish live and carry out in this world the works by which they live. In this book there are stories (estòries) of battles, of cities and ships and galleys, kings, and all the other ancient things that came to pass this book commemorates through figures. This book, Lord King," said the young man, "was made by the holy hermit, who was a philosopher; and from all the books that he could find, he drew all the histories (històries) that he could, and everything that he saw done by men and beasts and birds and trees and fish, he placed here in figures.
"Lord King," said the young man, "when the philosopher had finished his work, he departed to live in a hermitage, where he spent his days looking at the book, in order to have pleasure both physical and spiritual: physical pleasure, because the volume is beautiful, and well painted and endowed with many figures, spiritual pleasure, because, on account of what he saw with his physical eyes, he was converted to a spiritual vision, by which he saw God and his works in creatures. And the philosopher took pleasure from thinking about past things and the works that the creatures perform."]
This description, so compelling that an early reader has drawn a bracket around it in one of the surviving manuscripts, was long taken by scholars to represent a real encyclopedia, lost to one of the vagaries to which books are subject—neglect, vandalism, or theft. Thus, the Libre de plasent visió insinuated itself into the Lullian bibliography as a work apart. Yet it was never more than a title indicating a book no one claimed to have seen. The legend was overdue for critical examination when, in 1980, Anthony Bonner published a series of short iconoclastic pieces modestly titled "Notes de bibliografía i cronologia lul-lianes." Bonner observed how curious it was that a book of such "spectacular beauty" would be mentioned only once in the Middle Ages (by the purported author himself), and only three times in the early modern period, and never in any of the exhaustive catalogs of Llull's writings compiled during the centuries of his greatest fame. To Bonner, the description of the Libre de plasent visió smacked of novelistic invention.
Bonner has convincingly argued that the Libre de plasent visió should be eliminated from the list of Llull's texts. My purpose in returning to the subject at the beginning of this first chapter is, not to repeat his argument, but rather to suggest an alternative way to read the description of this encyclopedia. Representations of books, however unreal the particular object in question, reveal the paradigms and ideologies that underpin the making and use of specific kinds of texts in a given context. Llull's depiction of the Libre de plasent visió sets out all the objectives of scholastic encyclopedism: exhaustive coverage, the ordered presentation of material, the dissemination of knowledge beyond traditionally learned circles, and the conversion of souls. It constitutes one of the most elaborate surviving descriptions of the way encyclopedias were compiled and used in the Middle Ages. If we conceive of the scholastic archive as the system in which statements function, rather than as a collection of battered manuscripts, then the elusive Libre de plasent visió offers us the means to understand that archive. Thus, the early scholars who read the passage with such naive earnestness were right to take it seriously, to believe that it had relevance to a real medieval phenomenon; they erred only in assuming that the book's importance lay in its historical existence and singularity. The real importance of the description, to my mind, is Llull's paradigm of encyclopedism, in its epistemological foundation, its rhetorical practice, and its hermeneutics.
But medieval literary practice favored idealized, hyperbolic descriptions, and the depiction of this encyclopedia conforms to the expectations readers would have had at the time, not only for what the encyclopedia should be, but also for how ekphrasis should be written. The latter exigencies impinge on the former. The Libre de plasent visió is, in all its shadowy existence as an idealized form, a book about everything, filled with perfectly organized extracts of all the material that the hermit found in all the books he read—in short, it represents an aspiration that could never be fully realized. Some decades before Llull began to write, Vincent of Beauvais's Dominican superiors set for him a similar task. His inability to fulfill it, and the criticisms that early versions of the Speculum maius atracted, probably contributed some part of the biterness that occasionally stains the prologue to the Speculum maius, drafted after nearly ten years of work on the project. This text is more than a preface; titled the "Libellus totius operis apologeticus," it is indeed a full-fledged apologia, the only full articulation of the aspirations and travails of the encyclopedist to have been penned by a medieval writer.
Finding himself caught between that Scylla and Charybdis of criticisms, that his text has grown too long but does not say enough about certain subjects, Vincent poses a rhetorical question: "Quis enim omnia, que de singulis rebus in tam infinita voluminum numerositate per orbem usque quaque dispersa reperiuntur, in brevi possit colligere, cunctaque perstringendo simul in unum volumen manuale redigere?" [Who could possibly assemble all the writings about individual things, dispersed throughout the world in such an infinite multitude of volumes, and touch briefly upon all of them in a single volume, as in a manual?] (LA ch. 11). After recounting his futile efforts, undertaken as a penance, to reduce the text to the length of the Bible (ch. 16), he concludes bleakly:
Tanto igitur, tamque laborioso opere per Dei gratiam ad finem usque perducto, ego quoque navem meam per spaciosissima scripturarum maria jam ex longo tempore fluctuantem ipsaque distractione semetipsam quodammodo lacerantem ad portum stabilitatis sue reducere cupio. Quod utique dum per imbecillitatem conatus mei vix facio, serenato quodammodo liberoque rationis oculo hoc ipsum opus intuens, et in statera discretionis appendens in parte quidem negligenter egisse, in parte vero modum excessisse me reperio.... Hec sunt ergo, in quibus sicut nec ipse mihi complaceo, sic etiam Deo et hominibus displicere formido. (LA ch. 18)
[After completing, by the grace of God, such a laborious work, I now desire to bring my bark, long tossed in the wide sea of writings and battered by its own perplexities, back to the port of stability. The work that I, in the frailty of my efforts up to now, have barely been able to accomplish, I consider with an eye of reason, as it were, calmed and liberated. Weighing this work upon the scales of my discernment, I see that in part I acted negligently, and in part I clearly exceeded the reasonable measure.... Here therefore is the work, with which I fear, just as I displease myself, so I may also displease God and men.]
The disillusionment of these lines may seem to undercut the idealism of Llull's description, just as the unrestrainable proliferation and fragmentation of the encyclopedia that Vincent's apologia serves to preface may seem to break open the unity and coherence of the Libre de plasent visió. These books represent two extremes, and the other encyclopedias of the period fall somewhere between them. Nonetheless, Llull's parable and Vincent's apologia articulate a shared aspiration, and the confrontation of the two texts opens a space for a discussion of scholastic textual and intellectual practices in their general outlines and of the specific forms of encyclopedism they determined.
Although these two texts will remain the touchstones throughout the present chapter, the discussion will range widely, for I wish to provide a general overview of the practices and materials of scholasticism, the ways in which statements were made, the enunciative fields that accommodated them, and the archive that determined the relation of those fields to each other. This presentation must move more quickly than the discussion in the remaining chapters, and it must trace a number of intersecting, even interwoven threads. Since such material does not lend itself to a chronological treatment, it has been organized around four practices or means of creating and organizing knowledge: figura, glossa, compilatio, and ordo. Each opens a window on scholasticism and is essential for understanding encyclopedism. The first topic, figura, draws our attention to semiotics, to the way medieval thinkers, influenced by a few phrases from the Pauline Epistles and the more extensive reflections of Augustine, understood signs to function—be they pictures, objects in the world, or words arranged into stories, traced onto the page, and bound into books. It also requires us to consider the competing epistemology of the philosopher who was to pose the most serious challenge to the hegemony of Augustinian discourse in the Middle Ages: Aristotle. With the second practice, glossa, I shall continue the discussion of semiotics from a different angle, by considering the exegetical work that explicates such signs: in nature, understood as a second, created revelation, and in the primary revelation, Scripture. Once I have considered both sides of this diptych, I shall turn to the practice of compilatio, which brings competing discourses into contact in texts that have been woven from citations of other texts and are thus both old and new. The discussion of compilatio will allow me to distinguish the encyclopedic florilegium from two other important scholastic genres, the summa and the prosimetrum. It will also make it possible to consider how the scholastics produced order out of the chaos of citations—and books—that they had inherited. The ordering of everything from disciplines to libraries (and hence the archive in both senses) will therefore be the final practice described in this chapter. The ordo that so preoccupied scholastic thinkers gives form to the largest of the florilegia, creating the books that we recognize as encyclopedias. The quartet of figura, glossa, compilatio, and ordo has not been chosen at random. Not only does it provide the terms with which to describe scholastic and encyclopedic practice; it also rewrites the quartet of figures of resemblance with which Foucault describes the preclassical episteme, with very different results. I shall therefore conclude by measuring the distance between the scholastic archive and the preclassical archive as Foucault describes it in The Order of Things.
Figura
The description of the Libre de plasent visió is oddly enigmatic. It exhibits one of Llull's characteristic literary techniques, the repetition of a single word for emphasis: in this case, figure. Yet that repetition has the paradoxical effect of making the sense of this polysemic term more elusive than it would be in a passage where the word was occasionally replaced by a partial synonym or paraphrase, for such replacements would help narrow the lexical field through a sequence of fine distinctions or differences (which is, since Saussure, the way language has been understood to function). In this passage, however, the few words that would appear to restrict the sense of figure are similarly multivalent, as we shall soon see.
Let us begin our investigation of the figure with the acceptation that, from the sixteenth century to the present day, readers of the Libre de meravelles have universally understood: graphic illustrations or miniatures. Interpreted in this way, Llull's exemplum would appear to depict an illustrated book similar to the Liber floridus (ca. 1125) compiled by one Lambert of Saint-Omer, canon and encyclopedist. Lambert compensated for his dubious skills as a Latinist with his remarkable artistic talents; he generally proceeded by arranging fragments of text relevant to a particular object of knowledge around a central, graphic depiction of that object. I have reproduced the justly famous lion page as my frontispiece, despite the fact that this Romanesque book is earlier than the texts to which the present study is devoted, because it provides a visual translation of many of the practices proper to scholastic encyclopedism—which may explain why the Liber floridus maintained a modest popularity throughout the scholastic period (copies were not numerous, but they were made, a complicated undertaking that must have incurred considerable costs).
If we wanted to identify, among texts more widely read during the thirteenth century, those in which graphic figures play an important role, we would have to look to other (though not unrelated) genres. For example, bestiaries and similar texts (lapidaries etc.) elaborate Christian allegories out of ancient lore about the creatures. These texts belong to an old genre; most bestiaries were based on an anonymous Greek text of late antiquity, the Physiologus, which had been translated into Latin ca. 700. They remained popular, the subject of various translations and adaptations, throughout the scholastic period; Lambert mined the Physiologus for material, and later encyclopedists put it to more limited use. In manuscripts, the bestiaries were frequently—and beautifully—illustrated (pl. 1). The didactic function of these images is explained by Richard de Fournival (1201–60) in the prologue to the Bestiaire d'amour, an adaptation of genre to the courtly milieu that would have been standard reading in Paris during Llull's sojourns in the city. The book will combine both painture [painting] and parole [speech], for the first lends itself to hearing, the second to sight, and these senses are the portals of the memory. Through them, what is recounted in the text can be made present to the reader:
Et comment on puist repairier a le maison Memoire par painture et par parole, si est aparant par chou que Memoire, qui est la garde des tresors que sens d'omme conquiert par bonté d'engien, fait che qui est trespassé ausi comme present. Et a che meisme vient on par painture et par parole, car quant on voit painte une estoire ou de Troies ou d'autre, on voit les fais des preudommes qui cha en arriere furent aussi con s'il fussent present. Et tout aussi est il de parole, car quant on ot .j. roumans lire, on entent les fais des preudommes aussi con s'il fussent present.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from READING THE WORLD by MARY FRANKLIN-BROWN Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of The University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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