A New Beginning: Poliziano’s Panepistemon

Angelo Poliziano is among the first humanists to restore not only the encyclopedic conception of the ancients, but also the encyclopean term after a centuries-old and significant absence of its use. The framework proposed in Miscellanea, Nutricia and especially in the Panepistemon (Poliziano’s inaugural lecture devoted to Nicomachean Ethics at the Studio Fiorentino in 1490, is a modern classification of knowledge, which includes not only sciences, but also liberal arts, maechanics and even those “arts that are more rough and trivial", as long as they are useful for human life. In such encyclopedic knowledge, a new humanistic concept of philosophy assumes a precise unifying fiction