Everyday Memory > Theodor Zwinger, Theatrum Vitae Humanae
Throughout the Renaissance, the practice of “universal bibliography” attempted to offer readers strategies to deal with what Ann Blair has termed “information overload,” a growing feeling that the proliferation of information thanks to print and an increasingly-globalized world threatened to overpower the capacity of human memory. These volumes were vast, and perhaps none was vaster than Theodor Zwinger’s Theatrum Vitae Humanae, which featured excerpts from classical and contemporary texts designed to address nearly all elements of human experience, as glimpsed in the selection featured here.