Neil Kenny

‘During the Renaissance,’ runs this volume’s blurb, ‘very divergent conceptions of knowledge were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopedism, which treated knowledge as an ordered and unified circle of learning in which branches were logically related to each other. By contrast, writers like Montaigne saw human knowledge as an inherently unsystematic and subjective flux.’ In the book, Dr. Kenny explores the distinctions and overlaps between these two worldviews, with a specific focus on the literary career of François Béroalde de Verville (1556-1626), an author whose name I had first heard as the author of Le Moyen de Parvenir (‘The Way to Succeed’) a supposedly near-unreadable, and sporadically obscene work, somewhat reminiscent of Rabelais, that had been first translated into English by a young Arthur Machen. Béroalde was also responsible for a French version of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, entitled Le Tableau des riches inventions, to which he added a ‘Steganographic’ preface, packed with alchemical imagery, which purports to expound on the symbolism of the book’s frontispiece. Béroalde, by the way, defined steganography as ‘the art of representing plainly that which is easily conceived but which under the coarsened features of its appearance hides subjects quite other than that which seems to be represented…’ Dr. Kenny explains how, in his first books, the polymathic Béroalde was an exponent of the encyclopædic school of thought, but that in his later works he moved away from this position to one which instead exemplified a Montaignesque relish for the miscellaneous, the uncategorisable, and the uncontainable.… (plus d'informations)