Encyclopaedic Visions
Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture

Cultural history of Enlightenment encyclopaedias revealing Enlightenment debates concerning organisation and communication of knowledge.

Richard Yeo (Author)

9780521651912, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 29 March 2001

358 pages
25.6 x 18.3 x 2.6 cm, 0.965 kg

Review of the hardback: 'It is a wonderful virtue of Yeo's work that it uses one text to cut across so many pressing problems of Enlightenment science and literary culture … a fundamentally groundbreaking work.' Brill

The eighteenth-century English dictionaries of arts and sciences claimed to contain all knowledge that a person of education should possess. These early encyclopaedias responded to the explosion of information by reducing knowledge to essentials, stressing the need for a coherent account of the sciences, and for some time excluding biography and history. Richard Yeo places these scientific dictionaries in a rich cultural framework of debate that includes the arrangement of knowledge, the Republic of Letters, the Enlightenment public sphere, copyright issues and the specialisation of science. He discusses dilemmas involved in the quest for knowledge to be both organised and readily available, examining assumptions about the organisation, communication and control of knowledge in these works. Elegantly illustrated and accessibly written, Encyclopaedic Visions provides a major contribution to Enlightenment studies and the history of ideas in general.

Introduction: the encyclopaedic tradition
Part I: 1. Encyclopaedias in the Republic of Letters
2. Scientific dictionaries and 'compleat' knowledge
3. Containing knowledge
Part II: 4. From commonplace books to encyclopaedias
5. 'The best book in the universe': Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia
6. Communicating the arts and sciences
7. The Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Scottish Enlightenment
Part III: 8. Copyright and public knowledge
9. Why dedicate an encyclopaedia to a king?
10. Editors and experts
Conclusion.

Subject Areas: History of science [PDX], History of ideas [JFCX]