In what follows, I use the term “en

In what follows, I use the term “encyclopedic” broadly to refer to texts that present some mixture of “eine kohärente Gesamtschau der Natur, der Geschichte, der Moral, des Lebens und des ewigen Heils” (a coherent overview of nature, history, morals, human life, and eternal salvation).14 No single one of these elements must be present for a work to be considered as part of an encyclopedic genre. The one thing needful is a concern with the ordered totality (variously defined) of knowledge. Ultimately, I rely on a Wittgensteinian notion of “family resemblances”15 rather than a prescriptive catalogue of essential encyclopedic features derived from a normative precursor-text (e.g., Isidore’s Etymologiae), and try to shift the discussion of medieval encyclopedism away from its grounding over the last twenty years in the encyclopedia per se.For heuristic purposes, it may be useful to distinguish between the following groups of texts (which I capitalize):