The Enlightenment Encyclopedia Today

The encyclopedia is back. Not the thing, the big compendium hogging the shelves of the reference room, but the style of reading and thinking: broad, fast, informational, fragmentary, and networked. Increasingly, in the age of the Internet, the normative experience of reading seems to resemble the traditional experience of reading an encyclopedia. This shift has been the subject of both anxiety and excitement, and now, of historical research, too. In recent years, historians such as Ann Blair, Richard Yeo, Daniel Brewer, and David Bates have asked, what is an encyclopedic way of thinking, seeing, writing, or reading? What are its sources and modes? Why at certain historical moments does the encyclopedic approach, as against the close-reading approach, for example, become central to cultural consciousness? Why, in the twenty-first century, does our culture of information hark back so strongly to that of the eighteenth century?

In a variety of ways, the two books under review here both grapple with this set of questions and problems, as well. Both books suggest that to understand today's encyclopedism, we need to understand the encyclopedism of the eighteenth century. And, importantly, both suggest that to understand that encyclopedism, we must read beyond the great works such as the Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert (1751-72). Both books suggest that the influence of the famous encyclopedias of the period can be best comprehended through less canonical works and works in other genres, which reveal the breadth and the complexity of information culture.

Jeff Loveland's thoughtful An Alternative Encyclopedia? Dennis de Coet-logon's "Universal History" (1745) addresses these questions through a detailed study of a single, forgotten eighteenth-century work. From a literary and intellectual standpoint, Coetlogon's work was not very good, but Loveland argues that it was influential in its way, providing formal and commercial models adopted by highly successful works, including the Encyclopaedia Britannica. At the same time, he argues, Coetlogon's outlier characteristics, particularly in the area of politics and religion, allow us to see how diverse the encyclopedic terrain of the eighteenth century actually was. Ironically, because Coetlogon's work was highly derivative, it offers great material for illustrating formal variations on a single body of writing as well as on the meaning of originality and the circulation of texts in eighteenth-century print culture.

Stalnaker's sharp and suggestive The Unfinished Enlightenment: Description in the Age of the Encyclopedia examines the literary and epistemological strategies that characterized the eighteenth-century encyclopedia, especially the practice of description. Like Loveland, Stalnaker juxtaposes canonical encyclopedias of the era with works that are either forgotten now or remembered for something else entirely. In so doing, she reveals how ubiquitous and powerful the encyclopedic approach was during the period and the remarkable extent to which practices of knowledge and representation were shared by writers as disparate as natural historians and poets.

The central figure in Jeff Loveland's book is the obscure Grub Street encyclopedist Dennis Claudius de Coetlogon. Little-known in his own time, Coetlogon is that much more mysterious in ours. He seems to have been born around 1685, though possibly as late as 1700. According to his own account, he was from a minor French aristocratic family. But the details are fuzzy and self-contradictory: Coetlogon, for example, claims as his grandmother a French notable who notably had no children. Coetlogon's education presents difficulties too: he may have attended the Académie d'Angers, but no record of his name persists there. The first substantial documentation of his life relates to his hapless attempts to organize in favor of the Jacobites in England and to offer himself as a secret agent to this end. In 1727, Coetlogon wrote two letters from Paris to James Francis Edward Stuart, "the Old Pretender" and would-be James III, pleading for an...