Intellectual history and lexicography are related to each other in multiple ways. Intellectual historians study dictionary entries as documents of the thought – for instance, the political thought – of the past. They may also attend to broader questions of dictionary structure: how did a given lexicographer think about taxonomy? Sometimes lexicographers themselves construct dictionaries as contributions to intellectual history. And the history of dictionaries is part of the history of intellectual institutions (publishing houses, universities and academies, religious bodies, and so on), which have regularly determined the scale, the metalanguage, the degree of encyclopedic content, and the relationship to canons of literature, of the lexicographical work which they sponsored. These points have very wide-ranging implications: dictionaries ultimately belong to a global intellectual history.

This chapter assesses the cultural and broader symbolic significance of the symposium in Plutarch’s biographical and philosophical works. It begins by situating Plutarch’s references to the symposium in their cultural context, by examining the symposium/convivium as a key social institution in the Roman imperial period. Next, the chapter discusses the symbolic dimension of conviviality in Plutarch’s oeuvre, through characteristic examples from the Lives and Moralia. It underlines that, for Plutarch, the symposium serves as a tool for evaluating moral character, as well as for conducting cross-cultural comparison. In addition, Plutarch’s interest in philosophical dietetics turns consumption patterns and behaviour at symposia into an important point of focus and concern. The last two sections look closely at Plutarch’s two surviving sympotic works, the Banquet of the Seven Sages and Table Talk. It discusses their genre and literary techniques, their relationship to the philosophical tradition of sympotic writing initiated by Plato and Xenophon, and the central role they both assign to philosophical enquiry.

Modern historians of science often discuss the twelfth-century “discovery of nature” as a milestone in our relations with the environment. This article explores medieval scientific, literary, and theological writers who contributed to this distinctive set of attitudes even as it documents the significant continuities between these writings and those of classical and late antique authorities on the natural world. It traces how the encyclopedic imagination provided a hierarchical framework for understanding the world, and how this ontological scaffolding, in turn, underpinned the twelfth-century revival of Neoplatonic thought, as medieval Christian writers would enthusiastically adopt an earlier tradition of personifying nature. In the thirteenth century, this magisterial Natura came to reflect advances in the “new” Aristotelian science that would become the foundation of the medieval university curriculum. While the synthesis of Christian Neoplatonism and Aristotelian physis would remain the predominant model of nature for several centuries, it also occasioned polemical debates over how God related to the universe that he created and how knowledge of the natural world was to be valued and instrumentalized. This medieval vision of a human-scaled, personified nature would prove philosophically durable up to the Scientific Revolution.