Byzantine encyclopaedism of the ninth and tenth centuries

Abstract

Encyclopaedism was an ongoing phenomenon throughout the eleven hundred years of Byzantine history in two senses. Firstly, enkyklios paideia was the name used to characterise the basic secondary school curriculum; this in theory provided an ‘all-round education’ in the liberal arts, although in practice the enkyklios often consisted of little more than a heavy diet of grammar with smatterings of other subjects, from which only the more committed students would go on to study rhetoric and philosophy in depth, along with elements of the mathematical quadrivium. Secondly, Byzantine culture was permanently encyclopaedic in the sense that it was continually collecting, summarising, excerpting and synthesising earlier texts. Most of this activity was religious and geared to theological controversy and ascetic devotion. But there were times when it extended into the sphere of secular learning. The most significant of these times was the period of renewed cultural production in the ninth and tenth centuries that is sometimes called the Byzantine Renaissance, or the Macedonian Renaissance, after the dynasty that came to power in 867with Basil I from Adrianople, which was then, confusingly for us, the capital of the administrative circumscription known as Macedonia. © Cambridge University Press 2013.