International Workshop!

Historiographies of Identity VI:

Historiography and Identity around 1000 CE – China and the West

During this workshop, organized by the SFB VISCOM in cooperation with Princeton University - History Department and the ERC Starting Grant OverMode, international scholars from various disciplines will discuss comparative approaches to the study of historiography and identity as seen from their respective fields. The meeting is hosted by the Institut für Mittelalterforschung and will take place Wednesday 25 June 2014 in the Seminar Rooms on the Ground Floor of the Wohllebengasse 12-14 (A-1040 Wien).

Book tip!

Jason König/Greg Woolf (eds.), Encyclopaedism from Antiquity to the Renaissance, Cambridge University Press 2013

Table of Contents

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.