There is a rich body of encyclopaedic writing which survives from the two millennia before the Enlightenment. This book sheds new light on that material. It traces the development of traditions of knowledge-ordering which stretched back to Pliny and Varro and others in the classical world. It works with a broad concept of encyclopaedism, resisting the idea that there was any clear pre-modern genre of the encyclopaedia, and showing instead how the rhetoric and techniques of comprehensive compilation left their mark on a surprising range of texts. In the process it draws attention to both remarkable similarities and striking differences between conventions of encyclopaedic compilation in different periods. The focus is primarily on European/Mediterranean culture. The book covers classical, medieval (including Byzantine and Arabic) and Renaissance culture in turn, and combines chapters which survey whole periods with others focused closely on individual texts as case studies.

在启蒙运动之前的两千年里，有大量的百科全书式的著作流传下来。本书对这些材料作了新的说明。它追踪了知识排序传统的发展，这些传统可以追溯到普林尼和瓦罗以及古典世界的其他人。本书采用了一个广泛的百科全书概念，抵制了存在任何明确的前现代百科全书体裁的想法，而是展示了综合汇编的修辞和技术是如何在一系列令人惊讶的文本中留下痕迹的。在这个过程中，它提请注意不同时期的百科全书编纂惯例之间的显著相似性和惊人的差异。本书的重点主要是欧洲/地中海文化。该书依次涵盖了古典、中世纪（包括拜占庭和阿拉伯）和文艺复兴时期的文化，并将调查整个时期的章节与密切关注个别文本的章节相结合，作为案例研究。