Front cover image for Encyclopaedic visions : scientific dictionaries and enlightenment culture

Encyclopaedic visions : scientific dictionaries and enlightenment culture

"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 classification of knowledge, the tradition of commonplaces, 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, the history of science and the history of ideas in general."--Jacket
Print Book, English, 2001
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001
encyclopedias
xxi, 336 pages : illustrations ; 26 cm
9780521651912, 9780521152921, 0521651913, 0521152925
45828872
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