Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture

by Richard Yeo

• ISBN13: 9780521651912
• ISBN10: 0521651913
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-04-16
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	viii
Preface	xi
Acknowledgements	xix
List of Abbreviations	xxi
Introduction. The encyclopaedic tradition	1	(34)
PART I
Encyclopaedias in the Republic of Letters	35	(24)
Scientific dictionaries and `compleat' knowledge	59	(19)
Containing knowledge	78	(23)
PART II
From Commonplace books to encyclopaedias	101	(19)
`The best Book in the Universe': Ephraim Chambers' Cyclopaedia	120	(25)
Communicating the arts and sciences	145	(25)
The Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Scottish Enlightenment	170	(25)
PART III
Copyright and public knowledge	195	(27)
Why dedicate an encyclopaedia to a king?	222	(24)
Editors and experts	246	(31)
Conclusion	277	(7)
Bibliography	284	(39)
Index	323