French Literature Reviews - 2026
A. Blair, Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age
History, Politics and Society
Too Much to Know
Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age
Ann Blair
Preface by: Roger Chartier
Translated by: Bernard Krespine
Seuil, coll. L'Univers historique
Publication date 05/03/2020
25.00 € incl. tax
496 pages
EAN 9782021308471
How is one to classify, sort, and select when it becomes glaringly obvious that the exponential growth of knowledge production and our capacity to circulate it far outstrip our ability to comprehend it?
This question, which plagues so many of our contemporaries, is hardly new. There was a time, back in the sixteenth century, when humanists acutely felt this acceleration of time, compelling them to assimilate an unmanageable mass of knowledge. Alongside the scholastic forms of information organization inherited from medieval encyclopedism, novel methods of information processing emerged, driven by the spread of printing. Ann Blair’s book invites us to explore the material and social history of these new techniques for sorting, indexing, and consulting information.
Teeming with historical accounts, colorful figures, and concrete situations, Too Much to Know reads like a rich, vibrant catalog of the adventures of knowledge seekers. Ann Blair thus delivers a genuine material history of culture, grounded in everyday documents that serve, in essence, as the tangible vestiges of the intellectual endeavors of Renaissance humanists.
A student of Anthony Grafton—with whom she defended a widely acclaimed thesis on Jean Bodin and his Universae Naturae Theatrum (1596)—Ann Blair has been a Professor of History at Harvard since 1996.
View the book on the publisher's website…
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An article discussing this work can be read on en-attendant-nadeau.fr:
"Books to Read Everything", by Dominique Goy-Blanquet (online April 12, 2020)
"A genealogy of our anxiety": this is how Roger Chartier describes Ann Blair’s book in his preface, shedding light on the warm reception it received in the American media upon publication. This unusual success stems from the fact that Too Much to Know examines under a microscope a type of writing rarely studied with such meticulous care, let alone considered a genre in its own right—namely, works dedicated to "information management," those reading aids that have existed since antiquity: compilations, florilegia, miscellanies, dictionaries, concordances, bibliographies, and more. None escape her watchful eye, with her own publications ranging from Jean Bodin to "Latin Phrases in Asterix." As the Washington Post pointed out, her book is a mini-library in its own right.
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Ann Blair examines the intellectual and material history of information management from the sixteenth century, focusing on how the invention of printing transformed the organization of knowledge. Moving beyond medieval scholasticism, humanists developed novel reading aids and reference tools—such as indexes, commonpiace books, and bibliographies—to cope with an unprecedented expansion of texts. By investigating these everyday documents, the author provides a vivid account of how scholars and readers attempted to master an overwhelming abundance of written material long before the digital age.
This historical study appeals to historians, literature scholars, and anyone interested in the cultural techniques of reading and archiving. Placing our current anxieties about information overload into a deep historical perspective, the book demonstrates that the struggle to classify and select knowledge is a enduring human challenge. Readers seeking to understand the genealogy of modern information systems and the evolution of scholarly practices will find this rich exploration both illuminating and deeply relevant to contemporary intellectual life.