PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

means of cataloguing and indexing which would ultimately lead to the establishment
of the first museums. 850 An idea which proved helpful to this organization of
knowledge was the analogy of macrocosm and microcosm which had survived since
the Middle Ages. For example, the human body was seen by anatomists and natural
philosophers as a smaller-scale cosmos, a microcosm, whose internal organs and
operation mechanisms had to be analysed and classified in the same way as the
wonders of Nature. Similarly, the wide range of sixteenth century knowledge needed
to be assessed and catalogued to become part of the whole. Paula Findlen wrote of ‘an
attempt to manage the empirical explosion of materials that wider dissemination of
ancient texts, increased travel, voyages of discovery, and more systematic forms of
communication and exchange had produced’. 851 Michel Foucault in his Order of
Things wrote that two of the main characteristics of the period were classification and
exchange, which aptly describe the encyclopedic interest in Renaissance France. 852
This is proved, for instance, by Pierre de la Primaudaye, who wrote an encyclopedia
of morals and a four-part quasi-encyclopedia work which included ‘monsters’. 853
Anne Prescott noted that Primaudaye’s work represented a study of both macrocosm
and microcosm, of parts and wholes. It resembled ‘a circle of learning, a model of
those circles and circulations found also in ourselves, in our education, in the cosmos
itself’. 854 Neil Kenny examined another example, the polymath novelist François
Béroalde de Verville, whose works reveal a preoccupation with encyclopedic learning
850 See Findlen, P., ‘The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy’, Journal of the
History of Collections, vol. 1 (1989), pp. 59-78, and her Possessing Nature: Museums, Collecting, and
Scientific Culture in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley, 1994).
851 Findlen, P., Possessing Nature, p. 3.
852 Foucault, M., The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York, 1970), esp.
Part I, Chapters 5 and 6.
853 Pierre de la Primaudaye (1546-1619) was a Huguenot writer. He is remembered mainly for his work
L'Academie Française.
854 Prescott, A. L., ‘Pierre de la Primaudaye’s French Academy: growing encyclopedic’, in Rhodes, N.,
Sawday, J. (eds), The Renaissance Computer: Knowledge Technology in the First Age of Print
(London, 2000), p. 158.
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