From the Tree to the Labyrinth by Umberto Eco Read Free Book Online

only an accumulation of information, given that the organization of an encyclopedia also had a mnemonic role to play: a given order among things served to make them memorable, to remember the place they occupied in the image of the world (cf. Carruthers 1990 and Rivers 1997).
    Little by little, the encyclopedias tend to make the order that governs them easier to follow: in the thirteenth century, Vincent de Beauvais’s Speculum majus, with its 80 books divided into 9,885 chapters, already has the organization of a scholastic Summa. The Speculum naturale is inspired by a strictly hexameral criterion (the Creator, the sensible world, light, the firmament and the heavens, and so on, till we come to the animals, the formation of the human body and the story of mankind). The Speculum doctrinale treats of the human world and includes letters (philosophy, grammar, logic, rhetoric, poetics), morality, mechanics, and technical subjects, and, while the Speculum morale represents a sort of an ethical parenthesis (it is, incidentally, apocryphal), the Speculum historiale deals with human history or salvation history and has a chronological framework.
    Order takes on a preponderant role, between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with Raimon Llull’s Arbor scientiae (Tree of Science) —a veritable portrayal of the Great Chain of Being through a representation of the great chain of knowledge—from which burgeon the Arbor elementalis (objects of the sublunar world made up of the four elements: fire, air, water, and earth, with precious stones, trees, animals), the Arbor vegetalis, the Arbor sensualis, the Arbor imaginalis (the mental images that are the similes of the things represented in the other trees), the Arbor humanalis (memory, understanding, will, and the various arts and sciences), and then the Arbor moralis (virtues and vices), the Arbor imperialis (government), the Arbor apostolicalis (the Church), the Arbor caelestialis (astrology and astronomy), the Arbor angelicalis (angelology), the Arbor aeviternitalis (the Otherworld kingdoms), the Arbor maternalis (Mariology), the Arbor christianalis (Christology), the Arbor divinalis (Divine attributes), the Arbor exemplificalis (the contents of knowledge), the Arbor quaestionalis (40,000 questions on the various professions).

1.3.3.  From the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century: Toward the Labyrinth
    Some of Llull’s trees (the Arbor elementalis, for example) could still be interpreted as representations of the world and its parts, after the model of the Arbor Porphyriana. But, rather than a classification of reality, others suggest a classification of knowledge about reality. This is the bent that the Llullism of the humanists and the Renaissance will appear to take, in which more or less tree-like structures are designed to organize universal knowledge into “chapters.” 22 What we have here is not a classification of substances and accidents, but the index of a possible encyclopedia and an attempt to propose an organization of knowledge—an organization so important to the encyclopedist that at times the proposal is limited to the metalinguistic project of organizing this knowledge, putting off its actual investigation till a later date.
    The Margarita philosophica of Gregor Reisch (1503) is still conceived in a postmedieval spirit. In it, the author, after devising an arboriform index that appears as a schematic frontispiece designed to facilitate consultation, proceeds to “fill it in” with 600 pages of actual encyclopedic information. But often the index is proposed without filling in the blanks, as we see, for instance, in the case of Politian, whose 1491 Panepistemon is a meticulously structured summary under the aegis of Philosophy personified as mother of the arts or mater artium.
    Under the influence of Llull, the Dialecticae institutiones (1543) and the Dialectique (1555) of Pierre de la Ramée (also known as Petrus Ramus) both propose a rigorous method