Page "Encyclopedia" Paragraph 31

Much encyclopaedism of the French Renaissance was based upon the notion of not including every fact known to humans, but only that knowledge that was necessary, where necessity was judged by a wide variety of criteria, leading to works of greatly varying sizes.

Béroalde de Verville laid the foundation for his encyclopaedic works in a hexameral poem entitled Les cognoissances nécessaires for example.

Often, the criteria had moral bases, such as in the case of Pierre de La Primaudaye's L ' Académie française and Guillaume Telin's Bref sommaire des sept vertus & c .. Encyclopaedists encountered several problems with this approach, including how to decide what to omit as unnecessary, how to structure knowledge that resisted structure ( often simply as a consequence of the sheer amount of material that deserved inclusion ), and how to cope with the influx of newly discovered knowledge and the effects that it had on prior structures.