Omne Bonum, A Fourteenth-century Encyclopedia of Universal Knowledge: Volume I, Text and Volume II, Catalogue

In the third quarter of the 14th century, a clerk of the Exchequer compiled and wrote an encyclopedia of world knowledge for his own personal use. This manuscript, a mammoth work of 1100 folios and over 650 illustrations has survived in two large volumes, MSS Royal 6 E VI and 6 E VII, now in the British Library. In her authoritative text (Volume I), Professor Sandler indentifies, with intriguing methods of detection, the compiler and scribe of this vast encyclopedia as James le Palmer. She li…