The medieval genre of speculum literature, popular from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, was inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work.[1] However, some of these works have a restricted scope and function as instructional manuals.[2] In this sense, the encyclopedia and the speculum are similar but they are not the same genre.[3]
Specula often offered mirrors of history, doctrine, or morals. Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum Maius which included the Mirror of Nature, Mirror of History, and Mirror of Doctrine is not often described as a core representative of the genre. One historian has surmised that this is because Vincent's work was intended to be an objective work which is at odds with speculum literature, since it "is a subjective genre".[3] More usual members are found in this list:
Speculum Regale, King's mirror, Konungs_skuggsjá, written in the mid 13th century in Norway
Ormulum, written by a certain Orm in Central England, bears an indirect reference to speculum and may be translated as "Orm's Mirror". It is universal in contents in that it contains the appropriate homiletic materials throughout the Church calendar.
The Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae ("Mirror of the Magnificence of Rome") was a Renaissance "coffee table book" of prints of the sights of Rome, especially the antiquities, produced by the French print seller and publisher Antonio Lafreri (1512–1577). He had been publishing and distributing such prints, and selling them at his shop in Rome, since the 1540s. In the 1570s he hit on the idea of producing a title page for the albums of prints he also sold. Each copy of the Speculum may have had different contents, as the customer in Rome could make his own selection in the shop and have them bound up.[4]
^Franklin-Brown, Mary (2012). Reading the world: encyclopedic writing in the scholastic age. Chicago London: The University of Chicago Press. p. 273. ISBN9780226260709.
