THE POLYMATH

In this survey of polymaths, Burke offers “an approach to the social and cultural history of knowledge.”

The author, an emeritus professor of cultural history at Cambridge, delivers a collective biography of polymaths active primarily from the 15th to the 21st centuries—though Burke does occasionally journey further back, as in the cases of Hypatia of Alexandria, Hui Shi, Boethius, Hildegard of Bingen, and Ibn Khaldun. In concise and revealing vignettes, the author profiles dozens of “monsters of erudition,” proceeding chronologically in order to provide the context of intellectual and social trends that either fertilized or quashed the polymathic impulse. At times, Burke gets too absorbed in complete coverage of individuals and groups, at the expense of insight into the connections they made. Many of these intellectual giants sought to break down the barriers of communication between a growing group of specialists; they were “individuals and small groups concerned with the big picture as well as with detail and often engaged in the transfer or ‘translation’ of ideas and practices from one discipline to another.” Mostly, however, Burke provides well-rounded pictures of the polymaths, and his precisely observed anecdotes aptly range across disciplines, approaches, and contributions, covering motivations such as curiosity and the ordering and unification of knowledge as well as the reconciliation of ideas. By the late 17th and early 18th centuries, polymaths aroused suspicions of triviality, superficiality, and a confused mass of useless knowledge, and specialization became the dominant mode of inquiry. In the current digital age, which is characterized by “hyper-specialization,” polymaths are not nearly as relevant as they have been in the past, but, the author writes, “an elegy for the species is still premature.” In an appendix, Burke chronologically lists 500 significant Western polymaths along with their birth and death dates, ethnicity, and primary disciplines.

An absorbing group portrait and intellectual history.