Ann Blair. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. 382 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-691-005675-7.

"How is it possible to understand the whole universe?" asked the author of a 1643 geography, Theatre de l'univers, "[W]hat could we read that would treat absolutely everything? Thus he despaired of satisfying the encyclopedic ambitions announced by the popular literary form of "theater" (175). In her "histoire totale" of Jean Bodin's Universae Naturae Theatrum (1596), Ann Blair explains how Bodin thought it was possible to understand and treat absolutely everything (at least ...

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