Speculum literature

The medieval genre of speculum literature, popular from the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, was inspired by the urge to encompass encyclopedic knowledge within a single work.

The English word mirror appears in William Caxton's Myrrour of the Worlde (1490), one of the first illustrated books printed in English (a translation of L'image du Monde, an overview of the sciences); in the oft-republished A Mirror for Magistrates (1559); and in The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul, a manuscript translation from the French by the young Queen Elizabeth I of England.

The fourteenth-century mystic Marguerite Porete's Mirouer des simples âmes, The Mirror of Simple Souls is a devotional work that explores the seven stages of the soul's mystical "annihilation" through meditation and prayer.

The Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae ("Mirror of the Magnificence of Rome") was a Renaissance "coffee table book" of prints of the sights of Rome, especially the antiquities, produced by the French print seller and publisher Antonio Lafreri (1512–1577).

Each copy of the Speculum may have had different contents, as the customer in Rome could make his own selection in the shop and have them bound up.