The Palace Of Secrets: Beroalde De Verville And Renaissance Conceptions Of Knowledge

The Palace of Secrets: Beroalde de Verville and Renaissance Conceptions of Knowledge

Review"Kenny's erudition is impressive, and he offers many rich insights into the intellectual milieu of the late Renaissance, especially in France....Supplies a far fuller picture of Be'roalde's writings that anything available hitherto."--The Sixteenth Century Journal"Thorough, precise, lucid and elegant."--Times Literary SupplementDuring the Renaissance, different conceptions of knowledge were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopaedism, 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. This study explores the tension between these two views, examining the theories of knowledge, uses of genre, and the role of fiction in philosophical texts. Drawing on examples from sixteenth and seventeenth- century texts, and particularly focusing on the polymath B