Encircling Encyclopedias

Robert Morrissey and Philippe Roger, eds. L'Encyclopédie: du réseau au livre et du livre au réseau(Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001). Pp.141. _ 28.95.

Richard Yeo. Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Pp. xxi + 336. $60.00.

Enlightenment encyclopedias, like most other literary texts, make more sense when their cultural context is analyzed. The intellectual framework of the editors and collaborators, the commercial ramifications of the enterprise, and the transformations that altered and influenced multi-volumed and multi-editioned works over time all enter into their overall meaning. These factors also elucidate the particular meanings of discrete groups of articles about a given subject. The two books under review join recent scholarly studiesin contributing to the complex account of how encyclopedias were constituted in the eighteenth century and what they had (and have) to say. Two examples of this orientation include Marie Leca-Tsiomis, Ecrire l'Encyclopédie, Diderot: de l'usage des dictionnaires à la grammaire philosophique (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1999); and Alain Cernuschi, Penser la musique dans l'Encyclopédie (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2001).

Richard Yeo's Scientific Visions is devoted to the first part of this task. He states his limits at the outset: the book will not study the contents of scientific dictionaries in detail, nor their publication or readership history; it will instead attempt to "reveal and analyse the assumptions behind the encyclopedic project and to consider how these influenced coverage and format" (p. xvi). Various parts of this pattern have been elucidated before. Yeo's achievement is to find the pattern itself, and to present it in a closely structured exposition that is enhanced by beautifully chosen illustrations and epigraphs.

The introduction traces the encyclopedic tradition from which eighteenth-century encyclopedism derived. Medieval encyclopedias saw themselves as timeless reflections of the unchanging divine mind, while Renaissance works were conceived as summaries of essential subjects. In the following century, the tradition of dictionaries of arts and sciences, of history, and of "hard words" evolved gradually into the Enlightenment model of a small number of volumes giving comprehensive coverage of both old and new knowledge, organized according to a unifying scheme and edited by a single polymath. But by the end of the century, the typical encyclopedia was a multi-volume work composed of text furnished by specialist contributors; the only organizing principle was the non-hierarchizing alphabet.

The Cyclopaedia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences (first edition, 2 vol., 1728) can be considered as the first major scientific dictionary. Ephraïm Chambers narrowed the scope of coverage in his encyclopedia to more manageable proportions by excluding biography, geography and human history, as well as the information given in specialist dictionaries. The embrace of "scientific" remained quite large, including theology, music, grammar and logic, plus the natural sciences and their applications. The Cyclopaedia was envisioned as a summa of knowledge to rescue the researcher, who was no longer able to memorize all-important knowledge. In an illuminating chapter, Yeo interprets the rise of encyclopedias in the eighteenth century as a response to this proliferation of books. He links encyclopedias to the Renaissance practice of forming commonplace printed works as memory aids. The Cyclopaedia can be read as such a commonplace book, held together by 47 headings that serve to index it and to indicate an order for reading the text. It is a coherent book, and not just a lexicon, thanks to the systematic "View of Knowledge" and to numerous cross-references, features that the Encyclopédie would adopt. The Cyclopaedia was also a work with a mission, that of forming the mind to think in an orderly way. The transmission of knowledge necessary to the process raised certain linguistic questions, which Chambers resolved according to Lockean principles. Scientific knowledge could not be communicated without more precise and fixed definitions. Language had to be developed for explaining scientific concepts to the lay reader and for expressing the operations of the...