Omero e l'unità dei saperi: epica ed enciclopedia delle scienze tra sei e settecento

• Main Author: Begali, Mattia
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English; Italian
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2012
• Subjects: Plutarch (46?-120?); Romance literature
• ISBN: 9781267588845; 1267588845

In his influential Preface to Plato, Eric Havelock has defined the epic of Homer as the Hellenes' "tribal encyclopedia". With this definition Havelock describes the crucial role of the epic in the classical world where Iliad and Odyssey were considered to incorporate all the knowledge useful to become a valuable member of the Greek Polis. In other words, a Greek man's knowledge of the Homeric works granted him access to every branch of science, such as astronomy, ethics or rhetoric. This conception of Homer as omniscient poet was further developed by Neoplatonic thinkers in the late antiquity, and then introduced in the modern world by humanists such as Poliziano who assigned to Homer a central role in their project of an encyclopedic vision of knowledge. This dissertation aims to investigate the legacy of this interpretation of epic as an encyclopedic genre during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when the birth of the scientific method promoted by thinkers such as Descartes and Bacon caused a fracture in the seamless unity of knowledge, drawing a clear line between scientific and humanistic disciplines. My dissertation situates the debate on the value of poetry and myth in the context of modern discourses on knowledge: from the role of epic genre in the encyclopedic vision of science proposed by Jesuit scholars at the beginning of the sixteenth century, to the influx of Cartesian philosophy on the interpretation of Homer in prominent theoreticians such as Perrault and Gravina. The last part of this work is devoted to the relevance of epic narration in the foundation of a radically innovative concept of historical knowledge that Vico proposes in his Scienza Nuova. By exploring the connection between a literary genre and the concept of encyclopaedism, this dissertation aims to shed light on the debate regarding the unity of knowledge that predates the specialization of the disciplines established in the modern discourse on science by the enlightenment Encyclopédie.