Semantic order in the 16th Century: an introductory discussion of Conrad Gesner’s Pandectae

This work consists of a brief discussion regarding the semantic aspects contained in Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium... or Pandectae (1548) of Conrad Gesner (1516-1556). It situates the contributions of Gesner in the field of Knowledge Organization (KO) from a bibliographical and especially historicaldocumentary perspective. The Pandectae propose an innovative approach to the semantic treatment of documents, classifying them with a model which is an expansion from the medieval one while providing with orientation about the preparation of indexes. However, the effectiveness of the Pandectae is not necessarily in their semantic organization, but in their conceptual framework. Both Bibliotheca Universalis and in particular the Pandectae feature as fundamental historical documents for the understanding of the basis of knowledge organization. They are doubtlessly the earliest works to discuss bibliographical techniques (Wellisch, 1981) while materializing classificatory sensitivity - which is theorized, formulated and applied with logical finezza and acute sense of categorical multidimensionality (Serrai & Sabba, 2005).