William Harris Stahl (1908–1969)

It's taken me a while to finish this. There's a couple of reasons for that: I've had less time recently to read, and the book didn't keep my attention that well. I actually read a couple of other books between starting and finishing this. I am glad to have read it; it was incredibly influential in the middle ages, so it's well worth being acquainted with. It was a bit of a chore to finally finish it though.

This is one more of those notable go-to handbooks for the scholastics. Martianus Capella was another encyclopedist who wrote books dedicated to presenting a compendium of prior knowledge. Little is known about him. Some have suggested that he was lawyer and surmised that he was almost certainly a non-Christian. He apparently wrote this book for his son, who was also named Martianus.

A listing of some of the titles of the "books" or chapters in here might give a sense of the subject matter: book 3 is titled Grammar; book 4 is titled Dialectic; 5, Rhetoric; 6, Geometry; 7, Arithmetic; 8, Astronomy and 9, Harmony. The presentation of the material is rather mythologically theatrical. As the title indicates, it is a wedding party of various Roman deities where the subjects of books are personified and give an account of their occupations. The first two books (or chapters) are simply an introduction to the subjects treated. The account of Latin grammar was something that I had not encountered in the other encyclopedists I've read, so that was new. It was also something that didn't particularly interest me. Most of the other subjects were familiar territory for me. I'm not sure that Martianus had the same command of the material as Macrobius or Calcidius did. Martianus apparently relied so heavily on his sources that much of it was a direct quotation of whole passages of Pliny, Aristides Quintilianus, or some other previous writer. Macrobius and Calcidius seemed to have absorbed their sources a lot better, so that even when not original, they were not simply regurgitating someone else word for word.

Worth reading, but glad to be done with it. I might suggest reading it to someone who is as fascinated by the history of knowledge as I am, but if someone just wants to read a more engaging encyclopedist, I would definitely recommend Calcidius or Macrobius first.… (plus d'informations)