During the Renaissance, very divergent conceptions of knowledge
were debated. Dominant among these was encyclopedism, which treated
knowledge as an ordered and unified circle of learning in which
branches were logically related to each other. By contrast, writers
like Montaigne saw human knowledge as an inherently unsystematic
and subjective flux. The Palace of Secrets explores the tension
between these two views by examining specific areas such as
theories of knowledge, uses of genre, and the role of fiction in
philosophical texts. Examples are drawn from numerous sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century texts but focus particularly on the
polymath Beroalde de Verville, whose work graphically illustrates
these two competing conceptions of knowledge, since he gradually
abandoned encyclopedism. Hitherto Beroalde has been mainly known
for the extraordinary and notorious Moyen de parvenir; this is the
first detailed study of the whole range of his work, both fictional
and learned. The book straddles literary and intellectual history,
and indeed it demonstrates that the division between the two has
little meaning in Renaissance terms. The intellectual conflicts
which it explores have significance for the history of thought
right up to the Enlightenment.
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