‘Ce rond de sciences…nommé Encyclopédie’

Abstract

This essay examines the role of the place of the ‘encyclopaedia’, or circle of learning, in writing on poetics by humanist authors from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, from Italy and France and in neo-Latin and the vernacular. It explores two questions: what is the relationship between Renaissance appropriations of the encyclopaedia as an ideal and contemporary views on how poetic competence is achieved? And how does the place of the encyclopaedia interact with other poetic commonplaces in circulation in pan-European Renaissance culture? Comparative analysis of occurrences, overt and implicit, of the commonplace in writing by Joachim Du Bellay, Cristoforo Landino, Marco Girolamo Vida, and Jacques Peletier Du Mans reveals that the circle of learning is an important touchstone for positions taken in longstanding debates that see Neoplatonic and Horatian approaches to poetics variously opposed, appropriated, and reconciled.