MAKING THE “ROUND OF KNOWLEDGE” IN BACON’S WAKE: NAUDé, COMENIUS, AND BROWNE

This paper examines how three of FrancisBacon’s readers, Gabriel Naudé, Jan Amos Comenius, and ThomasBrowne, rethink the humanist library, the genre of the silva, and Bacon’s callfor a new kind of encyclopedism. Naudé adumbrates the organization andcontents of the ideal library so that judicious readers may integrate the oldand new learning. In calling for a single pansophist book, Comenius heraldsBacon’s inductive method and yet would restore metaphysics to theencyclopedia. And after his own efforts in Baconian encyclopedism in thePseudodoxia Epidemica, Thomas Browne writes a catalogue of books andartifacts that is at once an elegy to the republic of letters and a ludic plea toinclude admiratio in “the round of knowledge.” This diverse receptionhistory emblemizes the rich, often contradictory potential of Bacon’sencyclopedic vision.