Stories of Everything: Epics, Encyclopedias, and Concepts of “Complete” Knowledge

Abstract

Epic poetry has long enjoyed a critical association with various manifestations of encyclopedic learning. The reputation of Homer and Virgil’s comprehensive knowledge in antiquity and the Middle Ages — a reputation neither always unchallenged nor entirely defeated, even as late as the early eighteenth century — helped make epic an enduring signifier of great magnitude and longevity, if no longer one of truly universal scope. This article traces the trajectory of the changing status of epic in the late seventeenth century through the eighteenth-century encyclopedia. The treatment of established commonplaces about epic and knowledge and the continued pursuit of “completeness” by Francis Bacon, Alexander Pope, Ephraim Chambers, Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d’Alembert furthered a process of generic differentiation that contributed to the separation of encyclopedias from epic poems, literature from Literature, and the sciences from the humanities.