The palace of secrets : Béroalde de Verville and Renaissance conceptions of knowledge
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Bibliographic Information
The palace of secrets : Béroalde de Verville and Renaissance conceptions of knowledge
Clarendon , Oxford University Press, 1991
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Bibliographical references: p. [268]-298
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
During the Renaissance, very divergent conceptions of knowledge were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopedism, which treated knowledge as an ordered and unified circle of learning in which branches were logically related to each other. By contrast, writers like Montaigne saw human knowledge as an inherently unsystematic and subjective flux. The Palace of Secrets explores the tension between these two views by examining specific areas such as
theories of knowledge, uses of genre, and the role of fiction in philosophical texts. Examples are drawn from numerous sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts but focus particularly on the polymath Beroalde de Verville, whose work graphically illustrates these two competing conceptions of knowledge, since he
gradually abandoned encyclopedism. Hitherto Beroalde has been mainly known for the extraordinary and notorious Moyen de parvenir; this is the first detailed study of the whole range of his work, both fictional and learned. The book straddles literary and intellectual history, and indeed it demonstrates that the division between the two has little meaning in Renaissance terms. The intellectual conflicts which it explores have significance for the history of thought right up to
the Enlightenment.
Table of Contents
- Renaissance encyclopaedism - encyclopaedic ideals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, genre
- encyclopaedias and miscellanies
- from the encyclopaedia to the miscellany - philosophical forms, philosophical subjects, readership
- structuring knowledge - encyclopaedic structures, encyclopaedic struesure under strain, miscellanies and fragmenation
- representations of nature - "meslange", "diversite", and "difference" in nature, representing "meslange", "diversite" and "difference"
- fiction and philosophy - philosophical fictions, encyclopaedic revelations inside palaces and cabinets, quests inside and outside palaces and cabinets
- the status of knowledge - ethics, epistemology, the limits of knowledge.
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