Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe

by William N. West

• ISBN13: 9780521809146
• ISBN10: 0521809142
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-03-24
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This book analyzes the discourses and practices that defined Renaissance theater, as related to the development of encyclopedic texts and vice versa. Looking at what "theater" meant to medieval and Renaissance writers and critics, William West sets Renaissance drama within one of its cultural and intellectual contexts. Although the study focuses on the Renaissance, it also draws on and analyzes substantial classical and medieval material. It is of equal interest to intellectual historians, theater historians and students of early literature.

Table of Contents

List of illustrations	x
Acknowledgments	xiii
Note on texts	xv
Introduction: Circles of learning	l
1 The space of the encyclopedia	14	(29)
2 The idea of a theatre	43	(36)
3 Tricks of vision, truths of discourse: Illustration, ars combinatoria, and authority	79	(32)
4 Holding the mirror up to nature?: The humanist theatre beside itself	111	(32)
5 The show of learning and the performance of knowledge: Humors, Epigrams, and "an universal store"	143	(50)
6 Francis Bacon's theatre of Orpheus: "Literate experience" and experimental science	193	(31)
Notes	224	(50)
Bibliography	274	(17)
Index	291