Encyclopaedism

Abstract

At the beginning of the 1990s, the issue of whether and to what extent medieval encyclopaedias may have had an impact on Dante’s works seems to have been settled by Zygmunt Barański and Cesare Vasoli. Differently to their skeptical viewpoint, this chapter pleads for a reconsideration of the question by taking into account the results that almost thirty years of research on medieval encyclopaedias, their genres, their evolution, and the array of styles have brought to the fore. On the basis of this much more differentiated picture of how encyclopaedic writings organize knowledge, the chapter emphasizes the extent to which Dante’s Convivio may be placed within the range of experimental encyclopaedic forms that cropped up in the aftermath of Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum. At the end, the chapter addresses encyclopaedic aspects in the Commedia.