"Athanasius Kircher: the Last Man Who Knew Everything" by Paula Findlen, a history professor at Stanford, is a good book that touches on this: https://books.go

"Athanasius Kircher: the Last Man Who Knew Everything" by Paula Findlen, a history professor at Stanford, is a good book that touches on this: https://books.google.com/books?id=C0iGO0Hr95UC https://books.google.com/books?id=C0iGO0Hr95UC One way of thinking about it is that polymaths like Kircher and Dee simply can't exist anymore because the sheer amount of data encompassed in science and the humanities have expanded beyond the capacities of any single human mind. It's worth keeping in mind that early modern polymaths still generally believed that the age of the world could be measured in thousands rather than billions of years, and that the sum total of all human knowledge could fit in a few hundred feet of library bookshelves. No one in a position to be a polymath now holds those illusions anymore.