The shattering mirror: Enyclopedism as literary practice in medieval France

This dissertation examines the role that systems of linguistic representation, verbal art, and their visual manifestation in the codex played in the medieval organization of knowledge. I take as my test case the encyclopedic texts that proliferated in the thirteenth century.

The medieval encyclopedia, unlike its modern descendant, was constructed from a patchwork of citations of authoritative texts dating as far back as the classical period. The encyclopedist arranged the articles according to some meaningful paradigm (the seven liberal arts, the great chain of being, and so on), thus recreating in the text's very structure some reflection of the world. Hence medieval writers' frequent choice of "Mirror" as a title for their work.

According to my analysis, medieval encyclopedists' practice of citation results in the charged juxtaposition of different uses of language, or what Mikhail Bakhtin would call "social languages," themselves arising from differing, even contradictory models of linguistic representation in the source texts. These dissonant "languages" are held together by a global organization that, particularly in the mid-to-late-thirteenth century, tends to be rhetorical---that is, it is based upon metaphorical correspondences or even narrative structures borrowed from other texts (the theory of narrative in the Middle Ages is expressed in discussions of rhetoric). This is the case in the most ambitious of all the medieval encyclopedias, Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum maius, or Greater Mirror (124os).

Late-thirteenth-century vernacular writers Jean de Meun, Matfre Ermengaud, and Ramon Llull experiment freely with the encyclopedic genre, infusing it with literary practices borrowed from the heavily rhetoricized lyric and romance traditions. Their greater use of figurative speech enriches the mix of languages, by turns calling attention to the artificiality of any verbal representation of the world and allowing the text to engage in an indirect referentiality of the kind that Paul Ricœur describes in his work on metaphor. The complex discursive structure that results at once threatens to undermine the encyclopedic project and frees the genre for a deeper reflection on the act of reading and writing the world, in which both exegesis and rhetorical invention play key roles.