Encyclopaedic knowledge - factual knowledge of the divine and human
worlds - had profound effects on intellectual activities in the early
Middle Ages and its aftermath. Authors and scribes were raised in an
intellectual and didactic tradition in which the acquisition and
development of encyclopaedic knowledge was highly valued. Their concern
with the elementary aspects of time, language, world history, God's
creation and the Bible informed their activities as compilers of
manuscripts or as producers of texts. They reaped the fruits of the
learning that had grown over the centuries, digested them, or discarded
them, or caused them to re-emerge after a long period of time and be
used for purposes quite different from those for which they had
originally been cultivated. The varieties of such fruit are as diverse
as encyclopaedic learning itself, involving musicology, epistolography,
liturgy, the study of grammar, codicology, the establishment of reading
programmes, the writing of history and, perhaps most prominently, the
compilation and promulgation of glosses and glossaries - one of the most
essential disciplines in early medieval learning.





The present volume casts light on the way in which encyclopaedic
knowledge came to fruition in the ever expanding and diversifying world
of medieval learning. Resulting from the fourth workshop in the
'Storehouses of Wholesome Learning' project, it builds on the
foundations laid by its predecessors. The contributors discuss the
influence of encyclopaedic knowledge in their respective fields of
expertise. Their generous responses have provided a rich palette of new
insights into medieval intellectual culture. Their articles deepen our
understanding of medieval learning in its ability to instrumentalise the
knowledge inherited from the classical world in the creation of new
cultures of wisdom.