DICTIONARIES AND ENCYCLOPEDIAS

DICTIONARIES AND ENCYCLOPEDIAS. The early modern period fostered the publication and use of a wide range of dictionaries and encyclopedias, starting with medieval texts that continued to be printed in the sixteenth century and culminating with works that set the modern standards for these genres, notably Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755), the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert (1751–1775), and the Encyclopedia Britannica (1768–1771).

DICTIONARIES

The term dictionarius is first attested in the thirteenth century to designate a collection of Latin words, often hard or specialized, meant for study. The first such lists were arranged thematically, but the Catholicon (1286) of the Dominican Giovanni Balbi of Genoa already offered an alphabetical listing of Latin words with definitions; it was one of the first printed books produced by Johannes Gutenberg in 1460 and was reprinted down to 1520. In a parallel line of development, medieval glossaries were antecedents to the polyglot dictionary. They started as Latin-to-vernacular translations until the Dominican friar known as Geoffrey the Grammarian first switched the traditional order to compile an English-to-Latin Promptorium in 1440, printed in 1499. In the sixteenth century, the term dictionary entered English and French, with Thomas Elyot's alphabetical Latin-English Dictionary (1538) and Robert Estienne's Dictionnaire français-latin (1539), which clustered proverbs and expressions under keywords ordered alphabetically. Henri Estienne's Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, still valued today for its Greek philological scholarship, clustered Greek terms according to their root and ordered the roots alphabetically. But thematic arrangements persisted too, as in John Withals's Latin Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Begynners (1553).

The humanist focus on practicing and teaching precision in Latin expression fueled the career of the longest-running dictionary of the early modern period: the Dictionarium of the Augustinian friar Ambrogio Calepino (1435–1511). First published in 1502 as a Latin-Latin alphabetical dictionary, it included illustrative quotations from classical texts for many terms. The Calepino went through 150 editions down to 1785, with many variations and additions made by editors and printers along the way. It grew by accretion to include translations of the Latin terms in up to eleven languages (in the edition of 1590) and, though the Calepino included some proper names, it was often published with a separate dictionary for proper names, Conrad Gessner's Onomasticon, first published in 1544. The work was so well known and so widely distributed that calepino came to be used as a generic term for dictionary and spawned the current French word for the appointment book (calepin). One seventeenth-century author, Gabriel Naudé, described how teachers especially relied on the Calepino and similar reference books to lift material for the commentaries on assigned classical texts that they would dictate to their students in class (Advis pour dresser une bibliothèque, 1627, p. 51).

But outside higher education, Latin was steadily losing ground in all areas of culture. Polyglot dictionaries spanned an ever wider array of languages—European (for example, Polish [1564], Welsh [1632], or Danish [1634]) and non-European, as increasingly encountered by merchants and missionaries: from Arabic (1505) to Amerindian languages (Nahuatl, 1555) to Japanese (1595) or Malay (1603). Within Europe the rise of national vernaculars was consolidated by the formation of the first two language academies: the Accademia della Crusca, which in 1582 made official the informal meetings of a group of Florentine intellectuals, and the Académie française, founded in 1635 by Louis XIII and his minister, Cardinal de Richelieu. Each of these academies set to work on producing a monolingual vernacular dictionary that would be normative of proper usage. The Crusca's Vocabulario appeared in 1612, while the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française appeared only in 1694, after the publication of other major French dictionaries, such as the Dictionaire [sic] universel of Antoine Furetière (1690) and the Dictionnaire françois of Pierre Richelet (1680). These dictionaries were prescriptive in that they did not include words that their authors considered in poor taste, for example, because they were old-fashioned, vulgar, or excessively technical.

When Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) designed his Dictionary of the English Language (1755) to rival the great French dictionaries, he created a new descriptive model to replace the prescriptive one. Drawing only on authors who were dead to avoid acrimony among the living, Johnson provided quotations to illustrate usage and numbered the different meanings, or senses, of a term. In these ways Johnson's Dictionary became the model for the modern dictionary in use today.

LATIN ENCYCLOPEDIAS

The term encyclopedia was coined almost simultaneously in many languages in the sixteenth century and attests to the widespread enthusiasm during the Renaissance for the ideal of a "circle of learning," which was thought to be the etymological meaning of the term. This long-traditional etymology is now considered spurious; the correct derivation is from the late antique notion of enkyklios paideia or common education/culture. Encyclopedia was not often used as the title of a reference work before the eighteenth century, when it became commonplace. Nonetheless the term can serve as a convenient category in which to group together works that have a variety of titles (including such colorful ones as "forest," "mirror," "theater," "pearl," or "cornucopia") and that functioned as encyclopedic reference works in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The first encyclopedias to be printed were medieval texts, especially Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the properties of things; 1230s, with 14 editions prior to 1500 and the last printing in 1601) and Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum Maius (Great mirror; 1255, first printed 1473, then as late as 1624). These large folio volumes gathered information from written sources and oral culture on a vast array of topics, especially the natural world and humankind, with additional books on world history, the disciplines, and moral philosophy in the Speculum Maius. Vincent of Beauvais explains his motivation in terms of constraints of time, memory, and overabundance of information that ring familiar today: "Since the multitude of books, the shortness of time and the slipperiness of memory do not allow all things which are written to be equally retained in the mind, I decided to reduce in one volume in a compendium and in summary order some flowers selected according to my talents from all the authors I was able to read" (Speculum Naturale, author's prologue). The presentation in short numbered chapters with topical headings arranged systematically in numbered books facilitated finding specific passages, particularly given such extra features as running heads, tables of contents, and alphabetical indexes present in both manuscript and printed versions.

An alternative encyclopedic tradition with roots in late antiquity (for example, Martianus Capella) was organized according to the disciplines. The Margarita Philosophica (Philosophical pearl, 1503) of the Carthusian Gregor Reisch (d. 1525) treated the traditional seven liberal arts—the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music)—with five additional books on natural and moral philosophy. The most fully developed encyclopedia in this genre is Johann Heinrich Alsted's Encyclopedia of 1630. Alsted (1588–1638) was a professor of philosophy and then theology at the Calvinist academy of Herborn in the duchy of Nassau. In this four-volume folio work he devised his own division of the disciplines and offered a short textbook for each in turn, including, after the preparatory disciplines of the liberal arts, the three higher faculties (law, medicine, theology), the mechanical arts, and a large "farrago" or medley of the "composite arts," many of them designated for the first time by terms of Alsted's own invention, from apodemica, or the art of travel, to stratagematographia, or the art of war strategy. Alongside this systematic presentation, Alsted also provided an alphabetical index, which combined related entries under a single keyword, much as indexes do today.

Another major reference genre that flourished in the early modern period from medieval origins is the florilegium. First developed in the thirteenth century as an aid to preachers, florilegia presented quotations and examples sorted under theological headings (such as the vices and virtues) to facilitate retrieval of material, for example, in composing a sermon on a particular theme. The headings in medieval, Renaissance, and early modern florilegia were typically arranged alphabetically. The humanist Polyanthea of Domenico Nani Mirabelli (1503, with at least 26 editions down to 1686) included classical authors, including poets, in addition to the traditional biblical quotations and church fathers. Through its long career, including a revised edition by the Lutheran Josephus Langius, the Polyanthea acquired new headings that moved away from the traditional theological ones to include the various disciplines (arithmetic, astronomy) and aspects of the natural world, and new quotations, notably long excerpts from Petrarch. The florilegium was primarily an engine for Latin rhetoric, a storehouse of readily available quotations with which to ornament a text and to prove one's standing as a person of learning.

One reference genre that was peculiar to the Renaissance and without medieval antecedent is the miscellaneous commentary, composed especially by humanist professors, who would gather in one book the fruits of their philological research and reading of ancient texts. Some were primarily linguistic commentaries, like the Commentarii Linguae Graecae of Guillaume Budé (Commentaries on the Greek language, 1529) or the Commentarii Linguae Latinae by Etienne Dolet (Commentaries on the Latin language, 1536–1538). Others offered encyclopedic historical and cultural commentary, like the Cornucopiae of Niccolò Perotti (1489), where commentary on a two-line epigram of Martial could run to sixty folio pages; the Lectiones Antiquae (Ancient readings, 1516) of Caelius Rhodiginus (Ludovico Ricchieri); or, most famously, the Adages of Desiderius Erasmus (1500, much expanded in 1508, then 158 editions down to 1696). These authors were inspired by ancient models such as Aulus Gellius's Attic Nights (c. 180) and prided themselves on the pleasure provided in the diversity and unpredictable succession of topics. Nonetheless these texts consistently contained alphabetical indexes that also made possible a focused consultation on a particular word or theme.

Also without medieval precedent, at the other extreme of orderliness, was the genre of the systematic commonplace book. Theodor Zwinger's Theatrum Humanae Vitae (Theater of human life; 1565, revised and enlarged to 4,500 pages in 1586) gathered tens of thousands of examples of human behavior excerpted from accounts of human history from all times and places, and from which Zwinger exhorted the reader to draw lessons for moral conduct. Zwinger used typographical symbols and different fonts to delineate a multilayered hierarchy of headings and subheadings and expended particular care on elaborate dichotomous diagrams, often continued over multiple pages, in which he presented the material for each book in tabular form. One can find such diagrams in Reisch and Nanni already, but the extensive use of this mode of presentation was given particular impetus, especially in Protestant contexts, by the influence of the Calvinist pedagogue and dialectician Petrus Ramus (Pierre de La Ramée; 1515–1572) who taught that through the careful subdivision of a subject in a tabular chart one could acquire a rapid understanding of it. Alsted, also a Calvinist, made considerable use of these charts in his Encyclopedia of 1630, but when Zwinger's Theatrum was reworked and expanded into the Magnum Theatrum Humanae Vitae (Great theater of human life; 1631, 8,000 pages in eight folio volumes), the charts and the systematic arrangement were dropped in favor of an alphabetical ordering of headings, in the style of a polyanthea.

VERNACULAR ENCYCLOPEDIAS

Disciplinary encyclopedias, florilegia, miscellanies, and commonplace books offered ready-made the kinds of notes—quotations selected from one's reading or abridgments from longer treatises—that students and teachers were expected to take and rely on in their work of reading and composing texts. Zwinger also describes the utility of his work for those too occupied with serious matters (for example, government) to have time to study. These works were in Latin in order to provide the fruits of study that carried authoritative status in the Renaissance and late Renaissance. Before 1650 only a few subject encyclopedias appeared in the vernacular, for example in cosmography (Sebastian Münster's Cosmographia, printed in German in 1544, and André Thévet's Cosmographie universelle, 1575) and agriculture (Charles Estienne's Agriculture et maison rustique [Agriculture and rustic home], 1566, and Olivier de Serres's Théâtre d'agriculture, 1603). Vernacular titles equivalent to those of the Latin miscellaneous commentaries appear in the genre initiated by the Silva de varia lecion of Pedro Mexia (1540), which was widely printed, translated, and imitated. These miscellaneously arranged collections of memorable stories and anecdotes, from both bookish and oral sources, overlapped to a certain extent with the contents of learned collections, but without the philological discussions, citations, and alphabetical indexes that gave the latter scholarly utility.

Francis Bacon (1561–1626) and Jan Amos Comenius (1592–1670) were among the first to envision encyclopedic projects in the vernacular, though they were never realized. Comenius's project of a Great Didactic called for abridgments of all important literature, but his most influential work was a kind of illustrated encyclopedia for beginning readers: the Orbis Pictus Sensualis (1658). The linguistic tide in scholarship had turned by the last quarter of the seventeenth century under the impact of national institutions like the academies and of a new science often but not exclusively composed in the vernacular (from René Descartes to Robert Boyle, though not Isaac Newton), and driven by expanding markets of educated men and women without proficiency or interest in Latin. Alongside the great vernacular language dictionaries, two new kinds of vernacular reference books appeared—the biographical dictionary and the dictionary of arts and sciences.

The biographical dictionary in the vernacular was imitated from Latin antecedents (such as John Bale, Johann Freher): the Grand dictionnaire historique (1674) by Louis Moréri and especially the work it inspired to correct its mistakes, Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697). Bayle studded his entries with two levels of footnotes, one to cite the sources of his exacting scholarship and the other to offer critical interpretation of the behaviors reported there, from the misdeeds of Old Testament figures to the virtues of his contemporary Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677). This widely owned reference work played a special role in the diffusion of early Enlightenment thought and established a model for a critical encyclopedia that was followed by Diderot. The largest offshoot of the biographical genre was the 64-volume Universallexikon (1732–1750) of Johann Heinrich Zedler.

The dictionaries of arts and sciences like John Harris's Lexicon Technicum (1704) or Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728) focused instead on presenting the developments of the new science: they were especially concerned to stay abreast of the latest work and strove to offer coherent summaries of entire disciplines, so that although they were alphabetically arranged, cross-references between entries and long synthetic articles would enable the reader to read closely and methodically through a subject. The project of translating Chambers' Cyclopaedia into French, which an ambitious publisher commissioned of the struggling author Denis Diderot, resulted in the famous Enlightenment Encyclopédie. Funded by subscription, the project rapidly expanded far beyond Chambers's original, with articles commissioned of 250 contributors filling seventeen volumes of text and eleven volumes of plates; it appeared over twenty-five years (1750–1775), including delays due to the objections of the French book censors. The work is alphabetically arranged, but the ideal of connecting all knowledge systematically survives through the abundant use of cross-references and in the Preliminary Discourse of Jean Le Rond d'Alembert, which offers a table charting the relations between the disciplines. The Encyclopédie triggered an explosion of works of that title in a variety of fields and set the pattern for the encyclopedia as a multivolume, multiauthor, illustrated alphabetized reference work that is still predominant today. Its first imitator was the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 100 weekly installments in 1768–1771, by two Scottish publishers as a response to the perceived godlessness of the French Enlightenment. While the Encyclopédie was not reprinted beyond the eighteenth century, the Encyclopedia Britannica became the most successful encyclopedia of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

See also Alembert, Jean Le Rond d' ; Bacon, Francis ; Bayle, Pierre ; Budé, Guillaume ; Comenius, Jan Amos ; Diderot, Denis ; Encyclopédie ; Enlightenment ; Humanists and Humanism ; Latin ; Ramus, Petrus .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Binkley, Peter, ed. Pre-Modern Encyclopedic Texts: Proceedings of the Second COMERS Congress, Groningen, 1–4 July 1996. Leiden and New York, 1997.

Burke, Peter. "Reflections on the History of Encyclopaedias." In The Social Philosophy of Ernest Gellner, edited by John A. Hall and Ian Jarvie, pp. 193–206. Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities 48. Amsterdam and Atlanta, 1996.

Darnton, Robert. "Philosophers Trim the Tree of Knowledge." In The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. New York, 1984.

Kafker, Frank A., ed. Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: Nine Predecessors of the Encyclopédie. Oxford, 1981.

Ong, Walter J. "Commonplace Rhapsody: Ravisius Textor, Zwinger and Shakespeare." In Classical Influences on European Culture, A . D . 1500–1700: Proceedings of an International Conference Held at King's College, Cambridge, April 1974, edited by R. R. Bolgar, pp. 91–126. Cambridge, U.K., 1976.