Christopher D. Johnson
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Research Associate, Bilderfahrzeuge: Aby Warburg and the Future of Iconology, The Warburg Institute, London, England

Nina Maria Gorrissen Fellow in History - Class of Spring 2015

Prior to his position at The Warburg Institute, Christopher D. Johnson taught at the University of California at Los Angeles, Harvard University, and Northwestern University. An accomplished scholar of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, he completed his PhD in comparative literature at New York University (2001) and his BA at St. Johns College (1991). Johnson is the author of Hyperboles: The Rhetoric of Excess in Baroque Literature and Thought (Harvard, 2010) and a highly-acclaimed translation of Francisco de Quevedo’s poetry (Chicago, 2009). His most recent book, Memory, Metaphor, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas of Images (Cornell, 2012), received widespread praise for its ability to convey Warburg’s lifelong study of Renaissance culture in all its complexity and nuance. Johnson has received fellowships from the Herzog-August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel and the Folger Shakespeare Library, among others.

Project Description

Encyclopedic Circles in the Renaissance and After

Johnson’s Academy project, “Encyclopedic Kinds and Circles of Learning in the Late Renaissance,” is part literary history, part intellectual history, and part history of the book. He is investigating the diverse, often competing genres that sought to find, order, and transmit encyclopedic knowledge in the late Renaissance. During this period, from roughly 1550 to 1700, the term “encyclopedia” was coined although not yet associated with a particular kind of work. Rather, “encyclopedia” suggested various intellectual and formal attempts to frame the ever-expanding range of learning in a period marked by increasing skepticism about received truths; it signaled Renaissance humanism’s ultimate efforts to reconcile knowledge about and from antiquity with new forms of learning spurred by the voyages of discovery and the desire to find better, more reliable ways of knowing nature. Despite the broad interest in “encyclopedism” among cultural and intellectual historians working today, Johnson notes that the question of genre has received relatively little attention. Encyclopedic works appeared as natural histories and cosmographies, treatises in natural philosophy, romances and satires, or in genres we no longer recognize. Johnson explores how these genres were fueled by literary imitation and rhetorical invention, even as the genres themselves shaped the various epistemologies found in late Renaissance encyclopedism. His project thereby aims to be the first monograph to describe, analytically and synthetically, how and why what Northrop Frye anatomized as the “encyclopedic mode” was central to representation, learning, and culture in early modern Europe.

Academy Activities

03 Mar 15

On Encyclopedic “Chaos”

Using examples from encyclopedic scholars Reich and Oviedo to underscore his argument that Renaissance encyclopedism “oscillates between a conservative, retrospective memorious pole and a more heuristic, progressive inventive pole,” Christopher D. Johnson stresses that these shifts in encycloped ...

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