Florilegium

A florilegium (Latin flos + legere, 'a gathering of flowers') is a curated collection of extracts from other authors, arranged by topic or theme. The form is medieval in its full development: monastic scholars would copy out useful passages from the Fathers of the Church, the Bible, and classical authors into a single manuscript, so that a preacher, teacher, or reader could find the best that had been said on grace, on friendship, on death, without hunting through the whole library.

The florilegium is the ancestor of the modern anthology, the commonplace book, and the book of quotations. It differs from all three in intent. An anthology aims at literary completeness or representative range. A commonplace book is personal — kept by an individual reader for their own use. A book of quotations aims at breadth and lookup. The florilegium sits between them: curated but not personal, thematic but not comprehensive, and always aimed at use rather than at showcase.

The greatest florilegia — Stobaeus's Anthology in Greek, the medieval Flores of Bede, the Renaissance Adagia of Erasmus — became reference works in their own right, quoted for centuries as if their extracts were the originals. This is a hazard of the form: the florilegium can outlive the works from which it was drawn, and readers begin to know the great authors only through the excerpts that were once made of them.

The modern reader can still make one. A well-kept florilegium of one's own reading — thirty passages on a single theme, gathered over a decade — is more useful than any general anthology, because the reader knows why each entry is there.