Universities stood for the principle of universal knowledge, divided into branches whose underlying unity was assumed. Expertise was needed to evaluate conflicting evidence. In the eighteenth century as the amount of information available in many subjects turned into an avalanche, specialization slowly emerged as the best strategy for determining which bodies of information were most relevant to one’s work and needed to be followed in detail. Leonardo developed many projects, most of them inconclusive, that took for granted connections between bodies of technical knowledge contemporary scholars treat as absolutely distinct. Burke notes that since the invention of the printing press, the increase in books published has been inversely proportional to the trust given to those who desire to know everything.Īt the beginning of the modern era, Burke argues, most polymaths were like Leonardo da Vinci, whose genius was based on practical experimentation rather than deep knowledge of classical literature. They were however operating in an environment of rapidly expanding information, speaking to publics growing increasingly indifferent, if not hostile, to universal conceptions of knowledge. The main factor unifying his subjects is that overwhelmingly they were white European men who assumed that the cultural traditions of the West were the necessary starting point for all branches of learning.
The presentation is, as a result, provocatively impressionistic rather than rigorously analytical. Burke argues instead that polymaths created their own distinct discipline-“the art of learning.” This contribution was a necessary and vital part of the constitution of knowledge in the modern era.īurke discusses 500 polymaths whose life trajectories that were often idiosyncratic and difficult to reduce to a limited number of patterns. They hover in the gaps between theory and practice, pure and applied knowledge, detailed analysis and general vision, rigor and impressionism, uncertain spaces that many historians of knowledge prefer to ignore. Burke argues that polymaths have long provoked conflicting opinions over where scholars should place them within the history of knowledge. Jefferson, like others equally famous, may be saluted as the “last of the Renaissance men.” Nonetheless, his activities as a farmer, a musician and composer, an architect, an archaeologist, or an inventor are generally noted only in passing, a curiosity about the man, rather than something essential to who he was or how his contemporaries saw him. Thomas Jefferson, for example, is best known for his work in politics, practical and philosophical, that contributed to the founding of the United States. Famous polymaths whose reputations have endured are known primarily for contributions in only one of the many fields in which they labored.
They are associated with charlatans and dilettantes. Labeled “specialists in generalities,” polymaths are typically condemned for the superficiality of their ideas. Burke argues that, for this heresy, historians have generally treated polymaths with contempt. Burke’s polymaths worked in multiple fields, now considered completely separate disciplines, but his subjects insisted instead on the unity of knowledge. During this period of time, typically referred to as the “modern age,” learning increasingly was organized around an intellectual division of labor and the proliferation of super-specialists. This new prosopographical study examines the careers of 500 polymaths over the last 500 years. The Author(s)īritish historian Peter Burke has written many books and essays exploring the history of knowledge. The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag.
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