Encyclopedism

Encyclopedism is not restricted to the history of encyclopedias as we now know them. Certainly, since the eighteenth century, this identification has been the dominant one; however, the term encyclopedism is best seen as a heuristic device that can legitimately be applied to other intellectual projects. Three main forms of encyclopedism can be discerned: first, the classical Greek and Roman notion of a circle of learning that an educated person should pursue; second, various schemes aimed at comprehensive collection and classification of an intellectual field or an aspect of the world; and third, the aim of condensing and summarizing knowledge from a wide range of subjects in a set of volumes, variously called compendium, dictionary, or encyclopedia.