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We are pleased to invite you to a lecture by dr Łukasz Wróbel from the University of Warsaw, titled:"Beyond Chronology: Allegory and the Encyclopaedic Subject in Seventeenth-Century Thought"
The lecture will take place on May 27, 2026, at 2:00 PM.
This lecture is part of the Renaissance Mind seminar series. Dr. Wróbel will explore how 17th-century thinkers - including Alsted, Descartes, and Comenius -used allegory to grasp the totality of knowledge "all at once." The talk examines how this "achronic" positioning of the subject established a new kind of epistemological authority, shifting the focus from a mere collection of facts to the speculative framing of a unified whole.
Full abstract:
This paper examines allegory not primarily as a rhetorical ornament, literary figure, or visual convention, but as a speculative device operating within seventeenth-century projects of encyclopaedic knowledge. Its central claim is that, in early modern encyclopaedic discourse, allegory could serve to establish the temporal position from which knowledge becomes graspable as a whole.
The argument focuses on three figures: Johann Heinrich Alsted, René Descartes and Jan Amos Comenius. In Alsted’s Encyclopædia Septem Tomis Distincta (1630), the encyclopaedia is situated in relation to God’s perfect memory: an imperfect human archive that nonetheless reflects a divine order in which all knowledge exists in unity and simultaneity. In Descartes’s project of mathesis universalis (Regulae ad directionem ingenii, 1628), especially in the formula “tota simul encyclopedia apprehendatur”, the subject of knowledge is imagined as capable of grasping the totality of the sciences “all at once”. In Comenius’s Orbis sensualium pictus (1658), the Teacher’s gesture of showing and naming constructs a quasi-transcendental position from which the visible world and the verbal order may be correlated.
These examples suggest that the encyclopaedic subject is not merely a compiler, observer, or organiser of knowledge. It is a figure produced by allegorical framing: a subject placed outside the ordinary succession of chronological time. Such achronic positioning does not abolish historical knowledge; rather, it legitimises the encyclopaedic claim to totality. The paper therefore distinguishes between “everything” and “the whole”: whereas “everything” implies an empirical and sequential accumulation of particulars, “the whole” functions as a speculative frame. Encyclopaedic knowledge need not contain everything in order to present itself as whole; it must instead produce the temporal and figurative conditions under which wholeness can appear.
In this perspective, allegory becomes a mechanism of epistemological authority. Its transhistorical validity, traditionally associated with sensus allegoricus, is transferred onto the encyclopaedic work and its subject. The paper argues that this allegorical achronia constitutes one of the temporal foundations of early modern encyclopaedism.
Biography:
Łukasz Wróbel, PhD, is a faculty member in the Department of Poetics, Literary Theory and Methodology of Literary Research at the Institute of Polish Literature, University of Warsaw. He lectures at the Faculty of Polish Studies and the Faculty of Oriental Studies. His work combines literary theory, poetics, intellectual history, and the history of knowledge. He is the author of Hylé i noesis. Trzy międzywojenne koncepcje literatury stosowanej [Hylé and Noesis: Three Interwar Concepts of Applied Literature] (2013). His current research focuses on early modern and nineteenth-century encyclopaedic forms, especially on the architectonics of encyclopaedic works, the epistemological production of totality, and the figures of the encyclopaedic subject. He is completing a monograph entitled Wyłanianie całości [The Emergence of Totality].
📅 When: 27 May 2026
🕑 Time: 2:00 PM
📍 Where: The event will take place in room 143 of the Staszic Palace and on the Google Meet platform.
Link: https://meet.google.com/cua-fwjo-ink
The event is organized within the ERC Research Project KnowStudents, no. 864542, headed by Prof. Valentina Lepri, and hosted by the Centre for the History of Renaissance Knowledge, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences, in Warsaw, Poland.
If you have any questions, please contact Szymon Nawrocki at [email protected].
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Event Venue
ulica Nowy Świat 72, 00-330 Śródmieście, Polska, ulica Nowy Świat 72, 00-330 Śródmieście, Polska, Warsaw, Poland
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