Reading the World: Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age

By Mary Franklin-Brown

The thirteenth century saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has called it the “century of the encyclopedias.” Variously referred to as a speculum, thesaurus, or imago mundi—the term encyclopedia was not commonly applied to such books until the eighteenth century—these texts were organized in such a way that a reader could easily locate a collection of authoritative statements on any given topic. Because they reproduced, rather than simply summarized, parts of prior texts, these compilations became libraries in miniature.
 
In this groundbreaking study, Mary Franklin-Brown examines writings in Latin, Catalan, and French that are connected to the encyclopedic movement: Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum maius; Ramon Llull’s Libre de meravelles, Arbor scientiae, and Arbre de filosofia d’amor; and Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose. Franklin-Brown analyzes the order of knowledge in these challenging texts, describing the wide-ranging interests, the textual practices—including commentary, compilation, and organization—and the diverse discourses that they absorb from preexisting classical, patristic, and medieval writing. She also demonstrates how these encyclopedias, like libraries, became “heterotopias” of knowledge—spaces where many possible ways of knowing are juxtaposed.
 
But Franklin-Brown’s study will not appeal only to historians: she argues that a revised understanding of late medievalism makes it possible to discern a close connection between scholasticism and contemporary imaginative literature. She shows how encyclopedists employed the same practices of figuration, narrative, and citation as poets and romanciers, while much of the difficulty of the imaginative writing of this period derives from a juxtaposition of heterogeneous discourses inspired by encyclopedias. 
 
With rich and innovative readings of texts both familiar and neglected, Reading the World reveals how the study of encyclopedism can illuminate both the intellectual work and the imaginative writing of the scholastic age.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226260709

Book preview

Mary Franklin-Brown is assistant professor in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

Printed in the United States of America

21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12   1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13:978-0-226-26068-6 (cloth)

ISBN-10:0-226-26068-2 (cloth)

ISBN-13:978-0-226-26070-9 (e-book)

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Medieval Academy of America.

Frontispiece: The Lion and the Porcupine. From the autograph manuscript of Lambert of Saint-Omer’s Liber Floridus, made at Saint-Omer (Artois), ca. 1125.

Ghent, Rijksuniversiteit, MS 92, fol. 56v. Photograph reproduced by permission of University Library Ghent.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Franklin-Brown, Mary.

Reading the world : encyclopedic writing in the scholastic age / Mary Franklin-Brown.

pages. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-26068-6 (hardcover : alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-26068-2 (hardcover : alkaline paper) 1. Vincent, of Beauvais, d. 1264. Speculum majus. 2. Llull, Ramon, 1232?–1316. Arbre de ciència. 3. Jean, de Meun, d. 1305? Roman de la rose. 4. Llull, Ramon, 1232?–1316. Libre de meravelles. 5. Literature, Medieval—History and criticism. 6. Encyclopedias and dictionaries—History and criticism. I. Title.

PN671.F735 2012

809'.02—dc23

2011044420

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI / NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

READING THE WORLD

Encyclopedic Writing in the Scholastic Age

MARY FRANKLIN-BROWN

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

For D. T. Franklin,

E crezatz

qu’amistatz

cascun jorn meillura,

meilluratz

et amatz

es cui jois s’aüra.

—Peire d’Alvernhe

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Explanatory Notes

Introduction

PART I. THE ARCHIVE

Chapter 1 The Book of the World: Encyclopedism and Scholastic Ways of Knowing

PART II. THE ORDER OF THE ENCYCLOPEDIA

Chapter 2 Narrative and Natural History: Vincent of Beauvais’s Ordo juxta Scripturam

Chapter 3 The Obscure Figures of the Encyclopedia: Tree Paradigms in the Arbor scientiae

Chapter 4 The Order of Nature: Encyclopedic Arrangement and Poetic Recombination in Jean de Meun’s Continuation of the Roman de la Rose

PART III. HETEROTOPIAS

Chapter 5 A Fissured Mirror: The Speculum maius as Heterotopia

Chapter 6 The Phoenix in the Mirror: The Encyclopedic Subject

Afterword

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index of Names and Titles

Index of Manuscripts

General Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Color Plates

1. Leaf from a bestiary (England, ca. 1200)

2. Opening leaf of a Bible moralisée (Paris, ca. 1220–30)

3. Tree of vices and virtues illustrating the Old French translation of Ramon Llull’s Libre del gentil (ca. 1274, manuscript Paris, ca. 1300)

4. Tree of Love, illustrating the Catalan translation of Matfre Ermengaud’s Breviari d’amor (1288)

5. Depiction of the Great Tree of Knowledge, illustrating a fifteenth-century manuscript of Ramon Llull’s Arbre de ciència (1295–96)

Figures

1. Creation, from a Bible moralisée (Paris, ca. 1220–30)

2. Pentateuch with Glossa Ordinaria (Paris, ca. 1164–70)

3. Allegory and diagram showing the Aristotelian classification of disciplines (Italy, ca. 1150–1200)

4, 5. Lambert of Saint-Omer, Liber Floridus, arbor bona, arbor mala (Artois, ca. 1125)

6. Ramon Llull, Arbor medicinae (ca. 1274), Tree of the Principles of Medicine

7, 8. Figures of the three status, from one of the oldest manuscripts of Joachim of Fiore’s Figurae (Italy, early thirteenth century)

9. Ramon Llull, Arbor scientiae (1295–96), Tree of Vegetal Life (woodcut Lyon, 1515)

10. Ramon Llull, Arbor scientiae (1295–96), Tree of Knowledge (woodcut Lyon, 1515)

11. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale (ca. 1240–60), Hd5 (Picardie, ca. 1280), Hrabanus citations

12. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb2 (Northern France, ca. 1265–1300), Macer citations

13. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum historiale (ca. 1240–60), Hd1 (Northern France, ca. 1280–1300), Hrabanus citations

14. Hrabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae crucis (ca. 810)

15. Bernard Silvester, Cosmographia (ca. 1247)

16. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb19 (ca. 1280–1300), bk. 18, De animalibus

17. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb7 (ca. 1265–1300), bk. 11, De seminibus

18. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb19 (ca. 1280–1300), bk. 27, De viribus animae quas habet quo ad se . . .

19. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1240–60), Nb19 (ca. 1280–1300), bk. 20, De reptilibus

20. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale (ca. 1249–60), Nb7 (ca. 1265–1300), detail of decoration

Tables

1. Divisions of philosophy according to Hugh of Saint-Victor

2. Hexameral organization of the Speculum naturale

3. Structure of the Arbor scientiae

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the culmination of a project that I have carried out while living in three different cities and visiting many more, so I am indebted to individuals and institutions in a number of places. I have now been five years in the Twin Cities, where the Department of French and Italian at the University of Minnesota, under the leadership of Daniel Brewer and Eileen Sivert, has unfailingly supported my long work on medieval encyclopedias. In Minnesota, I owe particular thanks to Susan Noakes, for her wise mentoring, to Juliee Cherbuliez, for reading bits and pieces of my writing and providing astute criticisms, to Oliver Nicholson, for generously answering random queries on Latin literature, to F. R. P. Akehurst, for applying his keen eyes to the proofs, and to John F. Boyle of the University of St. Thomas, for providing a specialist’s critique of my presentation of scholastic philosophy. I owe an older debt of gratitude to scholars at the University of California, Berkeley, who first set me on the path to this project. There I had the good fortune to read Old Occitan with Joseph Duggan, Old French with David Hult, and medieval Catalan with Charles Faulhaber, who remained generous and canny guides even as my research took unexpected turns.

Much of my research was done in Paris, where I could work in the great libraries of that city and easily travel (thanks to the wonders of the SNCF) to visit smaller collections elsewhere in France. While there I benefited from the art historical and codicological expertise of Patricia Stirnemann at the Institut d’histoire et de recherche des textes (branch of the CNRS) and from Monique Paulmier-Foucart’s deep knowledge of Vincent of Beauvais. I thank both Mme Paulmier-Foucart and Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet of the Université de Paris IV for reading and commenting on early versions of several of these chapters and Alison Stones for sharing with me the results of her recent research on the Gothic manuscripts of France.

Via correspondence, Mark Johnston of DePaul University has generously shared his expertise on Ramon Llull and Eva Albrecht of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven her recent research on manuscripts of the Speculum naturale. The two readers for the University of Chicago Press—Winthrop Wetherbee and Brian Stock—provided wonderfully helpful responses to the manuscript and suggestions for revisions, and Randy Petilos has guided this neophyte author through the review and publication process. I thank all these correspondents as well as all the audience members and reviewers who have, over the years, shared criticism and suggestions for individual sections of this book. These scholars have saved me from many errors; any that remain are my own.

As a scholar whose work is based on early books, I owe a debt of gratitude to all the libraries that have allowed me to consult their manuscripts or incunabula: in Belgium, the Bibliothèque royale, the municipal library of Brugge, the library of Grootseminarie, Brugge, and the Collège de Bonne-Espérance of Vellereille-les-Brayeux; in France, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, the Bibliothèque de la Mazarine, the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne, and the municipal libraries of Arras, Auxerre, Boulogne-sur-Mer, Chalon-sur-Saône, Dijon, Lyon, Rouen, Troyes, and Toulouse; in Germany, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich and the Staatsbibliothek of Berlin; in Great Britain, the British Library, the Bodleian Library, the Cambridge University Library, the Inner Temple Library, the Parker Library, and the libraries of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Exeter, Lincoln, Magdalen, and Merton Colleges at Oxford. I thank the Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes in Paris and the Atelier Vincent de Beauvais of the Université de Nancy II for making available copies of materials to which I would not otherwise have had access.

In Minneapolis, the Bakken Museum and the James Ford Bell Library and Wangensteen Historical Library of Biology and Medicine (both at the University of Minnesota) have given me access to their rare books. Kate Brooks, of the Wilson Library of the University of Minnesota, has been unfailingly helpful, and I owe a great debt to the staff of the Interlibrary Loan Office, who have done some heavy lifting for me, both literally and figuratively.

I would like to thank the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, the Collège de Bonne-Espérance, the Rijksuniversiteit (Ghent), the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the municipal libraries of Amiens, Arras, and Laon, the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the Aberdeen University Library, the Bodleian Library, the Library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the James Ford Bell Library for giving permission to reproduce photographs of books in their collections.

A number of organizations and institutions have provided financial support for my research for this book. I am grateful for a Chateaubriand Fellowship from the French government, a Georges Lurcy Fellowship, and fellowships from the McKnight and Imagine Funds of the University of Minnesota, which supported my many research trips to Europe; to the College of Liberal Arts of the University of Minnesota, for providing a semester leave so that I could finish revisions to the text; and to the Imagine Fund and the Center for Medieval Studies of the University of Minnesota, for defraying publication costs and making it possible to include illustrations. The Medieval Academy of America has helped fund this project in both its initial and its final stages, most recently with a subsidy for the publication of what has turned out to be a rather hefty book, and I thank the Academy for this continuing and invaluable support.

Last but certainly not least, I am grateful to DTF, who listened, sympathized, and occasionally suggested just going to a movie.

St. Paul

June 2011

EXPLANATORY NOTES

Quotations and Typography

We are fortunate to have adequate—in some cases excellent—modern editions of the majority of the texts treated in this study, with the conspicuous exception of the main text of the Speculum maius (although the prologue has been edited twice; see below). The most recent printed edition of this encyclopedia constitutes a major obstacle to scholarship.¹ The Atelier Vincent de Beauvais at Nancy was established to lay the groundwork for a critical edition, but the work is not complete. My analysis of this text has therefore involved more dependence on the manuscripts than has my work on Llull’s texts or the Roman de la Rose. The way in which I cite from the Speculum maius and the manuscripts of the text to which I have had recourse are detailed below.

I cite all other medieval texts from the standard editions, identified below and in the relevant notes. Manuscripts of these texts will also be identified in the notes when they become relevant. What interests me about the copies of the Arbor scientiae (of which there are only a small number) is set out in chapter 3. Ernest Langlois laid the groundwork for the study of the manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose a century ago; their iconography has since been discussed by Alfred Kuhn, Rosemond Tuve, John Fleming, Eberhard König, and Sylvia Huot. This last has also extensively studied the manuscripts’ rubrication, marginal annotations, and codicological structure. Readers interested in the Rose’s manuscript tradition may refer to this scholarship and view the updated list of extant manuscripts, the illustrations, and the invaluable spreadsheets that are now available from the Roman de la Rose Digital Library, http://romandelarose.org. I have little to add that would be relevant to the subject of encyclopedism.

Since I cite Latin texts from a number of editions with different typographic practices as well as from manuscripts, I systematize the orthography. I resolve all abbreviations and employ the v and j in consonantal positions, the u and i in vowel positions. The one exception to this rule is the i in maius when it is part of the title Speculum maius since the use of the i has become the accepted spelling. I indicate Roman numerals with lowercase letters and replace final j with i to conform to the other components of the numeral. Since the e alone was commonly used in medieval texts to indicate what would have been æ or æ in classical Latin, I have not thought it necessary to reproduce the cedilla added to the letter in some manuscripts and older editions. I have similarly replaced ſ with s.

Translations

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of Latin and medieval languages are my own. However, for the sake of familiarity, when translating the Vulgate, I have preserved the language of the Authorized Version except when that would obscure the specific meaning of a Latin word important to my analysis. As an aid to readers not versed in medieval languages, I indicate in the bibliography published English translations of the principal texts (when they are available).

When citing modern scholarship for which foreign-language titles are given in the bibliography, I provide my own translations, with one exception: I cite the standard English translations of Foucault since these are the versions with which Anglophones are familiar, although I also indicate the relevant pages of the French original in the notes. On the occasions where the translation is misleadingly inexact or in error, I have made corrections (enclosed in square brackets) to the English quotation.

The Speculum maius

My work is historical and theoretical; it is not philological in the traditional sense. Nevertheless, any scholar working on the Speculum maius faces a series of dilemmas in the field of textual criticism. Naturally, no resolution can be expected to meet with universal approbation. In the choices I have made, I have attempted to balance the historical ideal of representing the medieval state of the text against the practical needs of a diverse readership, many of whom have access only to printed editions.

Manuscripts Cited

I employ the sigla assigned by Hans Voorbij in Het Speculum historiale van Vincent van Beauvais for manuscripts of the Speculum doctrinale and the Speculum historiale. Voorbij also assigned sigla to the Speculum naturale manuscripts, but Eva Albrecht has recently revised this schema, identifying five of his twenty-five Nb manuscripts as belonging to a third recension, Nc, and also renumbering fifteen of the seventeen remaining Nb manuscripts to fill the lacunae created by removing the Nc manuscripts (Nb3 becomes Nc1, so Nb4 becomes Nb3, etc.). She has kindly communicated the new sigla to me (May 2011), and she plans to publish them online at http://www.vincentiusbelvacensis.eu. I have chosen to revise my manuscript references in accordance with Albrecht’s new sigla because they make it possible to distinguish manuscripts representing the third recension.

Nevertheless, I have been obliged to make one further alteration. Albrecht did not create new sigla for the four (originally Nb) manuscripts whose appurtenance to the Nb or Nc recensions could not be determined; she removed them from the renumbered Nb list and enclosed Voorbij’s sigla in parentheses. Thus, in the revised system, Nb7 and (Nb7) identify different manuscripts. This use of punctuation in manuscript sigla would have sown confusion in my text and notes, so I have taken the liberty of eliminating the parentheses and replacing the b with an x: hence Nx7 etc.

Finally, readers should be aware that, as Alison Stones has established,² Nb7 and Nb12 (previously Nb10 and Nb18) are in fact two volumes of the same copy of the Naturale that, like the Minneapolis and London volumes of the Cambron Naturale (now Nb8), have been separated.

Speculum naturale

Speculum doctrinale

Speculum historiale

References to and Citations of the Text

The text of the general prologue (the Libellus apologeticus) saw two editions in the twentieth century; both were published in the 1970s, when scholars were just beginning to sort out the various versions that the text had gone through. The manuscripts chosen for these editions represent the beginning and the endpoint of the text’s elaboration. Serge Lusignan edited the very first version, written in the mid-1240s (when Vincent still had in mind a bipartite encyclopedia), and preserved in a manuscript now in Dijon (Ha3):

Lusignan, Serge, ed. Préface au Speculum maius de Vincent de Beauvais: Réfraction et diffraction. Cahiers d’études médiévales 5. Montréal: Bellarmin; Paris: Vrin, 1979.

Lusignan supplements his edition with the chapters added to a subsequent version announcing a tripartite encyclopedia. This version of the prologue survives in the comparatively small number of copies of the Doctrinale but has never been edited in its entirety (it has, however, recently been translated by Monique Paulmier-Foucart).³ Anna-Dorothee von den Brincken edited the final version of the prologue, which some twentieth-century scholars believed to be apocryphal but which in fact appears to be Vincent’s own work:⁴

von den Brincken, Anna-Dorothee, ed. "Geschichtsbetrachtung bei Vincenz von Beauvais: Die ‘Apologia Actoris’ zum Speculum Maius." Deutsches Archiv für Erforschung des Mittelalters 34 (1978): 410–99.

This version is reproduced in the majority of Speculum maius manuscripts and announces a quadripartite encyclopedia (including the Morale, which Vincent never completed). The passages of the penultimate version treating the encyclopedia’s structure have been modified, and a few other passages that Vincent added when first revising the prologue have been eliminated. Unless otherwise indicated, I use the chapter numbers and cite from the latter edition. However, when dealing with the passages eliminated or substantially altered in the final version, I have recourse to Lusignan’s edition of the earlier versions.

For the remainder of the text, the situation is even more complex. The most recent edition (1624) of the apocryphal quadripartite encyclopedia is that of Balthazar Bellère of Douai, Speculum quadruplex sive Speculum maius, in four volumes, and this is the only edition of which a facsimile has been printed,⁵ making it the most widely available. But the tendency of the Douai editors to correct Vincent’s quotations using early modern editions of his source texts, their expansion of some citations, and their frequent errors of transcription make it impossible for scholars attending closely to textual details to draw conclusions about the medieval text when working exclusively from the Douai edition.

I have checked the Douai text of all the passages relevant to my work against the manuscripts of the Speculum maius available in Paris. For the Naturale and the Doctrinale, which survive in a limited number of manuscripts and which I cite frequently, I have used all the Paris manuscripts listed above. For the Historiale, which survives in numerous manuscripts and which I cite rarely, I have used only six Parisian manuscripts, all representing the final version of the text: He73, He75, He76, He77, He78, and He80.

The exact form of a few problematic passages early in the Naturale is significant for my argument. In these cases, I have checked the form of the citation in all the other Naturale manuscripts containing the passages in question. In addition, because the early editions also represent to some degree the manuscripts from which they were drawn, which may themselves have been lost, I have had recourse to the printed editions available to me. This is particularly illuminating because, ironically, the editions that preceded that of Douai generally give a more accurate text. In fact, B. L. Ullman has found the earliest Strasbourg editions to be the most accurate.⁶ The printed editions consulted are the following:

Strasbourg: Adulf Rusch, 1478.

Strasbourg: printer of the Legenda aurea, 1481.

Venice: Hermann Liechstenstein, 1492.

Venice: Dominic Nicolinum, 1591.

On the whole, the readings of the manuscripts agree with each other, against the Douai edition. Yet, for most of the passages relevant to my work, the edition’s sins are venial. The editors intentionally intervened very little in the citations that Vincent borrowed from Patristic or medieval writers, tinkering with word order or altering adverbs and conjunctions only in a way that does not affect the sense of the passages. For the texts of classical authors, on the other hand, and for the Confessiones of Augustine, in cases where Vincent (or the florilegium from which he happened to be citing) abbreviated a passage severely, the editors have frequently restored at least part of the original text.

Wishing to cite from a text to which most of my readers (including those in North America) would have access, I have chosen to use the Douai edition, but I have corrected the quotations in cases where that edition offers a serious misrepresentation of the medieval text: that is, in the rare cases where the text has been restored and in the more frequent cases where the edition gives what is clearly an error, altering or obscuring the full sense of a passage. (I have not attempted to restore the scholastic word order since I could not, in that case, have cited from the Douai edition at all; I have, on the other hand, modernized the punctuation.) The corrections to the text are indicated in the passage by a letter reference, corresponding to the list of rejected readings given at the beginning of the relevant numbered note. A square bracket (]) separates the rejected reading from the sigla of the manuscripts that give the reading that I have retained. When the Douai editors have significantly altered a whole phrase (generally by expanding it), the note will identify the parameters of the corrected phrase by also giving its first and last words before the manuscript sigla. Readers may notice that the manuscripts cited in this apparatus differ depending on the portion of the text cited; this is because so many of the copies survive only in fragmentary form (one volume of an original two-or four-volume set). Among the Parisian Naturale manuscripts, for example, Nb10 is a complete copy of the Naturale, and Nb14 is nearly so, but the others contain only half or one-quarter of the text.

In order to facilitate the location of the passages I cite in other editions or in manuscripts, my references will indicate book and chapter numbers from the Douai edition, rather than column numbers. It should be noted, however, that manuscripts of the various redactions of the Speculum naturale and the earlier print editions distribute the material differently among the chapters and also that many manuscripts now lack significant portions of text. In addition, many manuscript compilers and some printers made the general prologue and table of contents into a first book, so book numbers in the manuscripts often run one number behind those in the Douai edition, at least for the first portion of the text (some manuscripts give Douai Naturale books 21 and 22 as a single book 22, thus catching up to the Douai book numbers). Nevertheless, the manuscripts of the Speculum maius, with their tables, running headings, and rubrics, are remarkably easy to navigate through, and readers should not have too much difficulty locating the indicated passages. Voorbij’s descriptions and classification of the manuscripts in Het Speculum historiale van Vincent van Beauvais are an indispensable starting point for studying the manuscripts, although, because the Naturale was not his focus, his information on these particular codices is sometimes unreliable. Albrecht’s recent dissertation⁷ would in fact be the better source for information about Naturale manuscripts, and it is to be hoped that it will soon be published.

After I had completed my editorial work, Voorbij announced in the Vincent of Beauvais Newsletter that a digital facsimile of the Rusch incunabulum of the Naturale has been made available online by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek of Munich: http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0003/bsb00035779/images/index.html (vol. 1) and http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0003/bsb00035780/images/index.html (vol. 2). This edition is much closer to the medieval manuscripts than the Douai, but unfortunately the link does not work consistently, and in any case it was too late for me to reedit my quotations from it. It is to be hoped that the user interface will be improved and the digital facsimile will remain available for future work by scholars everywhere.

INTRODUCTION

These days, readers wander in the opalescent labyrinth of Wikipedia as the tomes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica gather dust on neglected shelves. The attraction has little to do with any conviction that the information to be found online is of higher quality than what may be found in print, and many users of Wikipedia can be induced to acknowledge that the Britannica is a more credible source. Even one of the founders of Wikipedia, Larry Sanger, has characterized it as "one of those sources regarded as unreliable which people read anyway."¹ It is tempting to attribute this reliance on the online service to physical inertia (why go to the library when you can go to Wikipedia without ever leaving home?), but there are other, perfectly reliable Web sources from which to choose, the Britannica among them. Wikipedia exercises some peculiar fascination over readers—and not only the youngest ones—a fascination that must derive from the characteristics that set it apart. Its designers did not content themselves with simply exploiting the Web’s ability to link topics; they also adopted the relatively new technology of open source software. Instead of soliciting articles from experts sanctioned by the institutions that currently arbitrate knowledge (university professors, authors of research published in peer-reviewed journals and books, holders of advanced degrees), Wikipedia invites its readers to become contributors, Wikipedians, by drafting or revising articles of their choice. The wager is that the online community constitutes its own fund of knowledge and that consensus will, eventually, eliminate errors.² In some cases, that wager has paid off; there are marvelous articles, drafted by serious, learned, and dedicated individuals willing to work without attribution or recompense, and many topics are discussed in a depth that the limitations of space and funding proper to traditional encyclopedias preclude. For medieval topics in particular (often marginalized in the academy but also the object of renewed interest among a larger public), Wikipedia has been a boon. Still, there is no guarantee of accuracy because Wikipedia depends on consensus, which is not quite the same thing.

Furthermore, given the way in which this encyclopedia is constructed, there is no guarantee that consensus can be maintained. In all but a select few articles that have been stabilized by those who oversee the service, errors or misinformation can always be reintroduced. Consensus can be undermined by any obstinate contrarian. The encyclopedia so conceived will never attain stability, and it is subject, to a degree that no prior encyclopedia has been, to the caprice of time. It changes from one moment to the next. The electronic medium makes possible what had never been possible before, a truly protean text, shaped by the accidents of Wikipedians’ own lives, educations, and personalities. Its most apt metaphor is perhaps the image of the bazaar that the programmer and writer Eric Steven Raymond has employed to describe Linux open source software. Raymond contrasts this bazaar to the cathedral, with which he represents the more traditional approach to developing complex software. According to his account, the Linux community at first struck him as a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches . . . out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles, while traditional software resembled a cathedral carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation.³ Although Raymond now argues that the bazaar is singularly effective for software development, these two opposed images also highlight its instability.

Perhaps unbeknownst to Raymond, his imagery intersects the imagery used by Émile Mâle on the eve of the twentieth century to describe the medieval encyclopedia, a carefully constructed intellectual cathedral.⁴ Such an image could still be used for the work that goes into print encyclopedias and reference dictionaries, although I doubt that all the editors and contributors involved in these projects would welcome the description of wizards or mages. There is nothing mysterious or magical about academic qualifications acquired with great labor and intelligence from institutions that have been established for the purpose of providing an advanced education. Scholars of some philosophical persuasions may also object to the implication that knowledge is a sanctuary. Nevertheless, these encyclopedias are planned, their realization guided by scholar-architects of extraordinary talent. For obvious reasons, a number of these scholars take exception to Wikipedia. In 2004, Ted Pappas, the executive editor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, stated that Wikipedia is not really worthy to be considered an encyclopedia, telling a reporter from the Guardian: Hyperlinks, bullet points and cut-and-paste press releases do not an encyclopedia entry make.⁵ Even some Wikipedians acknowledge the weaknesses of the service and express perplexity about how it should be characterized. One has written in a blog entry: "I don’t believe that the goal should be ‘acceptance’ so much as recognition of what Wikipedia is and what it is not. It will never be an encyclopedia, but it will contain extensive knowledge that is quite valuable for different purposes."⁶

According to such external and internal critics, Wikipedia does not fit the criteria by which encyclopedias are defined. It lacks many of the characteristics of the encyclopedias created during the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. It is not a book or a series of books. It does not have credentialed—or even named—authors. It does not offer reliably accurate and consistent information on any topic, whatever undergraduates may believe. All the expectations to which the Britannica and other print encyclopedias had conditioned readers have been swept aside. Yet Wikipedia still fits the definition offered in its own entry on the encyclopedia at 12:36 pm on Tuesday, 9 August 2011: a compendium holding a summary of information from either all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge. Perhaps it is these characteristics that define the encyclopedia, and the rest, the characteristics of the earlier print format, are merely peculiarities of one realization of the genre, susceptible to transformation with changes in technology, in textual culture, or in the institutions of knowledge. We are, in fact, living through a technological transition that is transforming encyclopedism, and our historical situation gives us a rare opportunity to reflect on the different ways in which the encyclopedia can be constructed—and has been over the centuries.⁷ Moreover, Wikipedia has proved to be a barometer for changes or disjunctions in the way in which knowledge is created. Originally suspect because of its failure to cite reliable print or electronic sources, it now has a stringent citation policy, but that has opened it to the charge that it is retrograde, hobbled by the idea of knowledge that guided print encyclopedias, and, thus, closed to any information that is transmitted orally or through traditional practices.⁸ This closure means that Wikipedia’s coverage is not as universal as its aspirations. As it turns out, because encyclopedists have usually been motivated by three principal goals—to represent all knowledge (or, at least, all the knowledge in a given field), to organize it (or make it, as we now say, searchable), and to transmit it to an audience broader than the select group responsible for its creation—changes in the way encyclopedias are constructed indicate nothing less than alterations to the very paradigms of knowledge and its role in the human community.

A Historical View of Encyclopedism

One of the objectives of the present book is to show that the Wikipedial paradigm for constructing and construing knowledge is not entirely novel. Wikipedia is certainly different from the encyclopedias of the modern period. Yet in its highly polyvocal nature and tolerance of dissent, even outright inaccuracy, the encyclopedic paradigm it represents is suggestively analogous to the encyclopedism of Western Europe during the period commonly termed scholastic (ca. 1100–ca. 1400). There is no simple relation between the pre-and the postmodern, and I shall here propound neither the transhistorical continuity of encyclopedism nor a rebirth of scholastic encyclopedism in the postmodern. Readers will have ample opportunity to observe the differences between premodern encyclopedias and Wikipedia. Nonetheless, the limited resemblances that our historical situation and cultural paradigms bear to premodern ones make it possible to perceive aspects of scholastic encyclopedism that were not perceptible before.⁹

Like our own time, the scholastic period was marked by the proliferation of new or previously unfamiliar knowledge in communities long accustomed to viewing the world in a particular way. As in our own time, this proliferation was related in complex ways to social, cultural, and technological changes. It touched off vociferous debate while creating the need for new educational institutions, venues for publication, and technologies of the word. Renaissance humanism is rightly cited for its influence on what would become modern intellectual culture, yet it was earlier, during the first centuries of the scholastic period, that the institutions and practices necessary to support such culture were created.¹⁰ This institutional development accompanied the greatest growth in the population of Europe before the nineteenth century. A larger population created the need for schools to educate more young men for parish ministry and clerical posts in government (monks and nuns were traditionally educated in their monastic communities, and the education of lay persons who required some degree of literacy was generally provided by private tutors or local clerics). Beginning in the eleventh century, the cathedral schools, which had been founded centuries earlier to further Charlemagne’s educational reforms, gained a renewed vitality. But the changes went far beyond the expansion of the clerical class. A new intellectual culture was taking shape in response to the ongoing rediscovery of ancient Greek thought (the writings of Plato and Aristotle) and to the commentaries and treatises of Muslim philosophers that accompanied many of the ancient texts in their transmission.¹¹ While Platonic ideas flourished briefly in the twelfth century and continued to exercise considerable influence in some circles, it was the Aristotelian texts on logic, ethics, metaphysics, and the physical sciences that most profoundly transformed thought over the course of the scholastic period.¹² Not everyone believed that these new texts could be harmonized with Christian theology, but a number of thinkers made the attempt, creating the atmosphere of dissent and debate that would so mark the period.

At the same time, the cities went on growing, and it eventually became evident that the parish clergy and canons regular would not be able to meet the intensifying pastoral needs of urban communities. Although the Cistercians were sometimes called on to preach, the monastic orders were not structurally well suited to assist the clergy in urban ministry, for their members were most often cloistered in abbeys in the countryside and their daytime occupations were codified by the centuries-old rules they followed. Therefore, in the early thirteenth century, the Franciscan and Dominican orders were established, mendicants whose rules allowed greater latitude for travel and participation in the life of the city. Their calling was to serve the poor and dispossessed, to preach, and to combat heresies of the kind thought to be gathering force in Languedoc. But a renewed ministry of preaching meant providing an advanced education to still larger numbers of young men. Under these diverse pressures, the demand for education became so great that the schools were superseded, absorbed into a new, larger administrative structure, the university, probably modeled on the craftsmen’s guilds.¹³ The universities accumulated larger libraries. With demand increasing from both institutions and individuals, book production expanded, moving from monastic scriptoria to a new commercial book trade that sprang up in the urban centers.¹⁴

The Romance languages simultaneously made their appearance—not as spoken languages, for they had already existed as such for centuries, but as written ones. Over the course of the twelfth century, the formerly oral tradition of Carolingian epic (the chanson de geste) was transformed into a written genre by members of the clerical class attached to the secular courts. These same clerics also began to translate Latin epics and Celtic oral tales, first into French, then into other vernaculars, creating a new genre, romance. A century or so later, vernacular lyric, which had also blossomed in the twelfth century, began to be transcribed and collected in large anthologies. Translators began making Latin historical, legal, philosophical, and scientific texts available in the vernacular, setting the stage for the ascendance of the vernacular as a language for intellectual endeavor in later periods.¹⁵ The literary and scholarly community had been transformed from one where a single language, Latin, governed exchange to one where writers could choose among a variety of languages for expression.

Although scholasticism lasted for about three centuries (medievalists disagree about its precise beginning and end), the texts chosen for the present study were all written during the thirteenth century, which saw such a proliferation of new encyclopedic texts that more than one scholar has been prompted to call it the century of the encyclopedias.¹⁶ These books often served as libraries in miniature at a time when learning, in all its plethoric diversity, was in high demand, but the expense of handmade books prohibited smaller foundations or individuals from amassing large libraries. And these books were more like libraries than modern encyclopedias because they reproduced, rather than simply summarizing, parts of prior texts. They were among a diverse group of widely popular books known to modern scholars as florilegia, from the Latin flos, or flower (a common medieval term for the extracts of which they were almost entirely composed), and legere, to choose.¹⁷ There were, naturally, many smaller florilegia, limited to a particular topic (such as moral dicta or elegant turns of phrase useful for letter writing), and many disorganized ones, but a few compilations attained imposing proportions, covered a wide range of topics, and were organized in such a way that a reader could easily locate a collection of authoritative statements on any given topic. These books came to function as encyclopedias.¹⁸

The thirteenth century was also a great period for cathedrals—hence Mâle’s intuition that the two phenomena must be related. To Mâle’s mind, medieval art was encyclopedic, a comprehensive program of teaching shaped by the scholastic passion for proportion, symmetry, and order. The encyclopedic impulse could thus express itself through any number of media, not all of them verbal. These observations have provided the seeds of my own work. But Mâle read the encyclopedia through the lens of his own era, and he had no reason to ask whether the proportions and symmetry he discovered there were really as perfect, the order as stable, as the columns and buttresses of his beloved churches. Twentieth-century developments in philosophy, literary theory, textual criticism, and codicology, as well as the popular revolution of Wikipedia, have made it possible to recognize in these medieval texts a conflict between the order to which the compilers aspired and the disruptive elements introduced through their practice of citation. Also newly apparent is the degree to which the later interventions of patrons and copyists further shaped (or fragmented) these texts. In a manuscript era, every individual copy would have already been unique, with its own set of unintentional errors, but conscious intervention by those wishing to modify texts magnified this phenomenon. As it turns out, the cathedral of the encyclopedic florilegium is not as solidly mortared as that image may imply; in some ways, it more closely resembles the bazaar.

The project that I have defined for the present book is therefore this: to set out a historical and theoretically self-conscious view of scholastic encyclopedism, based on careful readings of selected texts, that will provide a counterpoint to the encyclopedism of the present day and other periods while also suggesting a new way for us to understand scholasticism and late medieval literature.¹⁹ I shall advance an argument in two parts. First, because the scholastic intellectual revolution was created by reading new texts (rather than by conducting new experiments or observations of natural phenomena), knowledge was created through the myriad forms of textual practice. In this situation, the discursive disciplines—the trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and logic—assumed decisive roles in shaping medieval encyclopedias, and we shall see how encyclopedists deployed narrative and metaphor as organizational paradigms.²⁰ However, the power of such paradigms to unify the text, to make it coherent with itself, was severely limited by the very citations on which encyclopedic writing relied. The texts cited derived from diverse historical and institutional situations, and those situations shaped the discourses that they represent. I here employ the term discourse as Michel Foucault has used it, most explicitly in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), to denote a paradigm authorized by institutional power that allows the construction of both the subjects and the objects of knowing.²¹ The Britannica is one kind of discourse, in which subjects and objects are constructed in a particular way; Wikipedia has created quite a different one. In the Middle Ages, although compilation itself may be thought of as a specific discourse,²² its dependence on direct citation engages and incorporates diverse other discourses in a manner unequaled by the sparse notes and references of the today’s encyclopedias.

That scholastic encyclopedism is thus discursively heterogeneous is the second part of my argument. These encyclopedias, like libraries, become heterotopias of knowledge—that is, spaces where many possible ways of knowing are juxtaposed. And they inspire the following questions: If the subjects and objects of knowing shift from one discourse to the next, how can the encyclopedic text provide a coherent space for them to inhabit? How can it provide a stable position for the reader’s subjectivity? The responses to these questions have implications beyond the encyclopedic genre because encyclopedism as I understand it is but one manifestation of a dominant textual practice of the scholastic period. Historians began some time ago to challenge the old view of scholasticism as a period defined by Thomism, and they have drawn attention to other voices and views in the period (Grosseteste, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Ockham, etc.). But that work is still largely based on genres (commentaries, quaestiones, summas) that advance a discernible argument and reduce competing voices, by either synthesizing or rejecting them. If, however, we understand the encyclopedic compilation to be as important a component of the scholastic movement as the summa, then our view of scholasticism must change even more radically. It must take better account than it has hitherto done of the heterogeneity of encyclopedism. Such a revised understanding of scholastic textual practice can, in turn, illuminate some of the most challenging poetic and fictional texts of the late Middle Ages.

Generic Considerations

No study of premodern encyclopedism can begin without acknowledging one intractable problem. The word encyclopedia is not classical or medieval; it is a coinage of the Renaissance.²³ It may have originated from a felicitous error in a humanist edition of Quintilian in 1470. There has been some debate about the first intentional use of the word, but it is clear that the Latin form was already circulating among humanists in the last decades of the fifteenth century, and it was adapted to the vernaculars in the early sixteenth. True to the spirit of that time, it is constructed from two Greek roots, enkyklios [in the circle] and paideia [education]. The two terms had appeared together occasionally in antiquity, most notably in Pliny the Elder’s Naturalis historia (completed ca. 78 ce). Although most everyone agrees that this text (a compilation of sources on the natural world and medicine, with diverse digressions) is encyclopedic, classicists are still debating the meaning of Pliny’s cryptic reference in the prologue to "what the Greeks call enkyklios paideia."²⁴ In other ancient texts, this pair of terms refers, not to a book, but rather to a broad, preliminary program of study, the foundation for more advanced and specialized studies. In early Renaissance usage, encyclopedia similarly designates such a program or, as extensions of that sense, either the connections between the disciplines or a knowledge encompassing them all: le vray puys et abisme de Encyclopedie [the true well and abyss of the Encyclopedia], as François Rabelais sardonically put it.²⁵ Unambiguous references to the encyclopedia as a book or series of books do not appear until later periods, when the word will also be applied, retrospectively, to the largest of the scholastic florilegia.²⁶

Ancient and medieval writers nevertheless produced a number of texts that look encyclopedic to us because they were clearly inspired by the three goals I cited earlier: to provide a comprehensive overview of knowledge, to organize it, and to propagate it. In the ancient world, such texts were generally given titles to reflect their subject matter: Natural History, The Antiquities of Things Human and Divine, The Disciplines. In the scholastic period, this kind of title was still possible (On the Properties of Things), but compilers favored figurative formulations, such as The Greater Mirror, The Image of the World, or The Treasury. No term in classical or medieval Latin united all these texts, and only them, into a discrete genre. The word that comes closest to describing most of these books, florilegium, is also a modern coinage,²⁷ and it refers to other compilations as well, narrower in scope or less well organized, that we do not recognize as encyclopedias at all. Hence the necessity of qualifying the term florilegium as encyclopedic when speaking of the scholastic texts cited above.

The lexicological lacuna raises philosophical and methodological questions. Can we speak of encyclopedias written before the word, or any equivalent, ever existed? If ancient and medieval writers had perceived the encyclopedia as a genre, would they not have given it a name? Is the notion that all these texts fit into a single generic category only a mirage created by our own (post)modernity? The historian Jacques Le Goff takes the skeptical view: If medieval clerks did not light upon the word ‘encyclopedia,’ that is because they did not light on the thing, either. Yet even Le Goff is unable to escape the word in his attempt to designate these texts, which he calls pre-encyclopedias, encyclopedic desires, encyclopedic sketches.²⁸ It would seem that, though what classical and medieval writers lighted on was not the modern encyclopedia, we have no word other than encyclopedia with which to designate it.

The problem likely derives, not from a want of medieval books that look to us as if they should be called encyclopedias, but from the incommensurability of medieval and modern ways of thinking about texts. Judson Boyce Allen has shown how alien to us is the medieval version of Aristotle’s Poetics (which circulated with Hermann the German’s 1256 Latin translation of Averroes’s twelfth-century Arabic commentary) because, where we expect to find Aristotelian definitions of tragedy and comedy, we find instead that tragedy is an art of praising, comedy an art of blaming. Such a change does not simply oblige us to redraw the generic grid into which we insert texts according to their form and content: we must come to terms with the idea that genre can be a way of speaking. This is not the literary theory of Aristotle, or, for that matter, of Northrop Frye. The Latin commentators that Allen has studied came closest to our notion of genre when discussing the forma tractandi of a text, but that gerundive is important, for it indicates that these commentators were thinking less in terms of static form than in terms of (obligatory) action and process and, hence, of speaker, audience, and object. Thus, medieval genre "is not a concept which applies to texts as verbal constructs, but to verbal events which include both reference and rhetorical effect. . . . Forma tractandi is the form of a text, it is true, but in terms of modes of thought, reference, and effects which implicate the text in a great deal that would now be thought external to it."²⁹ In this context, it would be strange for a friar to announce that he was about to write an encyclopedia, but it would be perfectly fitting for him to give his text the title Greater Mirror, which sets the book in relation both to the world it represents and to the reader who gazes into it.³⁰

Yet the question remains of how we are to deal with this situation retrospectively, that is, how we are to isolate a group of texts to study. A Linnaean system of genres is still indispensable, for it provides the terminology needed for any nuanced comparison of texts, and I shall occasionally employ it for this purpose, but it is purely heuristic, without historical reality or intrinsic value. My methods will be principally descriptive and comparative, and I shall follow Hans Robert Jauss’s lead in describing a historical family of texts, presupposing that a certain concept of genre does influence the shape that writers give their texts, but it is created by singular, preexisting texts and is subject to revision by later writers.³¹ Such a view shifts our focus from taxonomy (which texts fit where?) to practice (how does a particular writer replicate or revise encyclopedic practices modeled by past texts?). And in this emphasis on practice we come closer, perhaps, to the medieval notion of forma tractandi as a process that is gone through. This is why I have chosen encyclopedism rather than encyclopedias as the focus of the present book. In the end, I am less interested in encyclopedias than in the specific intellectual and textual practices that shape them.

I therefore conceive of encyclopedias as the products of a practice that has metamorphosed through time. For example, Pliny and the scholastics share one characteristic that sets them apart from modern encyclopedists: they are compilers. Yet they do not all face the same degree of discord between their source texts. The scholastics, working much later than Pliny and obliged to negotiate the fissures between pagan, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian, between ancient and medieval, encounter more acute disharmony. Furthermore, they have diverse ways of handling contradictions between their sources: some indicate what they think of the value of particular sources; some are more concerned with synthesis than others, thus anticipating a more modern encyclopedism. At the same time, the difference between the titles chosen by Roman writers and those chosen by scholastics indicates that the two groups were engaged in distinct semiotic practices. Unlike Pliny, for example, the scholastic encyclopedists assumed that objects in the world carried symbolic meaning—a meaning that alone justified the writing of encyclopedias. Nevertheless, each scholastic encyclopedist negotiated the several levels of meaning differently. In the chapters that follow, I will be as much concerned with these variations as with commonalities.

Choice of Texts and Shape of the Study

Such a project requires us to consider a diverse group of texts. Our touchstone throughout this book will be one monumental encyclopedic florilegium, the tripartite Speculum maius, or Greater Mirror, compiled by the Dominican Vincent of Beauvais, who seems to have worked on the project from about 1235 until shortly before his death in 1264. I shall complement the discussion of this most canonical of scholastic encyclopedias with analyses of the texts of two writers less commonly included in studies of encyclopedism, the Majorcan evangelist and mystic Ramon Llull (ca. 1232–1315) and the Parisian clerk and translator Jean de Meun (d. ca. 1305). I shall treat two of Llull’s eccentric adaptations of the encyclopedic genre, the Libre de meravelles and the Arbor scientiae, as well as another text that is not an encyclopedia even in the broadest sense of the word, the Arbre de filosofia d’amor. The Arbre and Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Roman de la Rose engage deeply with the encyclopedism of their time. Both (as well as the Libre de meravelles) exploit fiction in order to dramatize the movement’s pretensions to universality and order, its ambitions to propagate knowledge, and its struggles with the incoherencies of compilatio. Together with the Speculum maius and the Arbor scientiae, these texts were among the most ambitious, perspicacious, or controversial productions of the thirteenth-century encyclopedic movement. Like Wikipedia, they provoked contemporary readers and laid bare the intellectual fault lines of their time.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, The Archive, is intended to articulate, in general terms, the relation between scholasticism and encyclopedism while also providing a brief explanation of the similarities among and differences between scholastic encyclopedism and that of earlier periods. The archive of the part title may be construed in the traditional way, as an accumulation of codices to be categorized and described, or in the more abstract Foucauldian sense, as the culturally and historically specific rules that render it possible to make certain statements but not others, to preserve the traces of certain statements, but not others—in other words, the conditions of possibility for the constitution of a material archive. The broad-ranging contextual discussion of part 1 provides the background for the other two sections, which are devoted to specific texts. Part 2, The Order of the Encyclopedia, offers a chapter on each of the three writers under consideration. Each chapter treats the organization and hermeneutics of an encyclopedic text (for Llull, the Arbor scientia) and makes two points, not necessarily in the same order. On the one hand, the chapters show how writers faced with a proliferation of possible orders of knowledge ultimately settled on rhetorical and exegetical paradigms for the arrangement of the material they had borrowed and adapted from other texts while also presupposing that readers would use their writings to interpret the world symbolically—to read it. This creates a clear continuity between encyclopedic and literary practices. On the other hand, the chapters identify problems in the organizational paradigms or hermeneutics of these texts and trace them back to a confrontation between conflicting discourses, thus preparing the ground for part 3. This final section, Heterotopias, begins by returning to the Speculum maius. Its first chapter offers focused interpretations of sample passages from the natural history portion of this encyclopedia, rather than global surveys, in order to examine more closely the materials, technique, and consequences of compilation. In this way, it describes the confrontation of discourses created by this textual practice, identifying the epistemological foundation and institutional investment proper to each discourse, and showing how their juxtaposition creates a heterotopia. The final chapter sketches out the position and agency that the heterotopia accords to the authorial, or the scribal, or the readerly subject, through readings of the Speculum maius, the Roman de la Rose, the Libre de meravelles, and, finally, the Arbre de filosofia d’amor. Thus, the ultimate question of this book is what sort of space the scholastic encyclopedia makes available for the knowing subject.

Disciplinary Configurations, Pre-and Postmodern

The second half of this introduction must be devoted to further methodological considerations, for the suggestion that my reading will be postmodern raises as many questions as it answers. That label has been claimed by an eclectic group of scholars whose methodologies are not necessarily compatible. My own approach will be postmodern in two principal ways. The first is my renegotiation of the disciplinary boundaries, established several centuries ago, that still govern our universities. Neither the generic coordinates of this study nor its emphasis on the discursive should be taken to indicate the esoteric