ABSTRACT
Dichotomous tables, including genealogical trees, were very common in early modern English print. They appear in examples of most major genres – theology, science, philosophy, history, medicine, and linguistics, as examples – and, as tables of contents, organize the book itself. Dichotomous tables are powerful forms of information design: they establish relationships between the whole and parts, between event and story, between time and space, and between cause and effect that condition not only what is known, but how it is known, remembered, and used. They have special properties: as John Bender and Michael Marrinan write, they use “the power of mathematics to open a conceptual space for correlations neither rooted in direct experience nor verifiable by the senses” (17). Popularized by Peter Ramus in his revision of Aristotelian method, dichotomous tables gave “visual form to an epistemological method equally applicable … to all disciplinary spheres” (Cormack and Mazzio 19). They drew on the authority of two other figures used in medieval philosophy: the Porphyrian tree, “which made possible a spatial representation of [certain aspects of] the genus-species relationship” (Ong, Ramus 79), and “the square of opposition” (79), a tool for logical analysis, based on degrees of general and particular differences between terms, which visualizes syllogistic logic. Like these forms, dichotomous tables produce categories through their own structural requirements, and define relationships through the disposition of elements within categories: they are, that is, a type of method. Christiane Klapisch-Zuber writes that dichotomous tables provide “a whole new dimension to one’s knowledge of the world” (116), but she understates their power:
dichotomous tables provide the world, the knowledge that comprises it, and the concept of dimensionality itself, all in one tidy, easy-to-print package.
