Looking up music in two ‘encyclopedias’ printed in 1501

Abstract

Abstract A modern user of a printed encyclopedia expects to find concise entries on a wide range of subjects organised alphabetically for ease of reference. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a number of scholarly texts of a particularly long and wide‐ranging character were essentially ‘encyclopedized’ through the provision of compendious subject indexes, appearing before the start of the text in some printed editions, to facilitate reference use. Two such texts that enjoyed a particular spike in Italian printed editions in the decades either side of 1501 were Niccolo Perotti's Cornucopiae, and the Aristotelian (or rather pseudo‐Aristotelian) Problemata, which was sometimes packaged together with Problemata by Alexander of Aphrodisias and Plutarch. Working with 1501 ‘encyclopedized’ editions of both texts, this essay asks a simple question: what would a reader learn by looking up music‐related terms in the indexes?