encyclopedist

Du Bois-Reymond was once lauded as “the foremost naturalist of Europe,” “the last of the encyclopedists,” and “one of the greatest scientists Germany ever produced.”

Until the moment, in the late seventeen-forties, when he was asked to undertake the Encyclopédie, Denis Diderot was mainly a figure of the low Enlightenment, and might have seemed a quite improbable encyclopedist.

His robot encyclopedist spoke in magnetic poetry phrases, which occasionally yielded uncanny reproductions of Plinian syntax but often fell flat.

Ancient encyclopedists, monks, theologians: the forgers of the chapter.

The classical tradition in the beginning was affected by the mistaken theories of medieval encyclopedists and by humanistic misinterpretations of the classics.