ABSTRACT
Volume I appeared in 1577 with a letter to Henri III recounting La Primaudaye’s visit to Blois, where the conversation at dinner showed the court to be ‘a schoole erected to teach men that are borne to vertue’. Moral information, La Primaudaye stresses, is multiple and varied-hence the paradoxical cousinship of the encyclopaedia and its parodic and often amoral frère enemie, the lanx satura of Menippean satire.3 His volume, he tells the king, is ‘a dish of divers fruits, which I gathered in a Platonicall garden or orchard, otherwise called an Academic’. This ‘Academic’ is, in the book’s fiction, a school established for young gentlemen, four of whom, tricked out with Greek pseudonyms, agree to show what they have learned by taking part in what passes for a dialogue divided into ‘days’ but is really a set of definitions and monologues. Here ‘days’ have little to do with any literal passing of time.4 Nor, since the young men seldom disagree, is there a clash of perspectives that might make this text dialogic in any significant sense. And a good thing too, some might say. Ambiguity of the sort found in such Renaissance dialogues as More’s Utopia might interfere with the flow of bits of information.
