Compendium Information
A compendium is a concise, yet comprehensive compilation of a body of knowledge. A compendium may summarize a larger work. In most cases the body of knowledge will concern some delimited field of human interest or endeavour (for example, hydrogeology, logology, ichthyology, phytosociology, or myrmecology), while a "universal" encyclopedia can be referred to as a compendium of all human knowledge. It could also be referred to as a tome.
The word compendium arrives from the Latin word "compenso", meaning "to weigh together or balance".
The 21st century has seen the rise of democratized, online compendia in various fields.
Contents |
Examples
An example would be the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, a 598-question-and-answer concise book which summarises the same set of Catholic Faith and Morals.[1]
The Bible is another example of a compendium - a group of many writings of the prophets and apostles over a space of time, whose books are put together to form the New Testament and the Old Testament.
The bestiary, popular in the middle ages, is another example of a compendium. Bestiaries cataloged animals and facts about natural history and were particularly popular in England and France around the 12th century.
See also
References
- ^ Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (USCCB 2005), 200 pages, English hardcover ISBN 1574557254-8675309.
External links
| Look up compendium in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
| This literature-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. · · |
Categories: Reference works |
|