Encyclopaedias in general

Interrelations

An encyclopaedia does not come into being by itself. Each new work builds on the experience and contents of its predecessors. In many cases the debt is acknowledged: the German publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus bought the bankrupt encyclopaedia of Gotthelf Renatus Löbel in 1808 and converted it into his famous Konversationslexikon (see Brockhaus Enzyklopädie), though Jesuits adapted Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel without acknowledgment in their Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1704). Classical writers made many references to their predecessors’ efforts and often incorporated whole passages from other encyclopaedias. Of all the many examples, the Cyclopaedia (1728) of the English encyclopaedist Ephraim Chambers has been outstanding in its influence, for Diderot’s and Rees’s encyclopaedias would have been very different if Chambers had not demonstrated what a modern encyclopaedia could be. In turn, the publication of Encyclopædia Britannica was stimulated by the issue of the French Encyclopédie. Almost every subsequent move in encyclopaedia making is thus directly traceable to Chambers’s pioneer work.

Readership

Encyclopaedia makers have usually envisaged the particular public they addressed. Cassiodorus wrote for the “instruction of simple and unpolished brothers”; the Roman statesman Cato wrote for the guidance of his son; Gregor Reisch, prior of the Carthusian monastery of Freiburg, addressed himself to “Ingenuous Youth”; the Franciscan encyclopaedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote for “ordinary” people; the German professor Johann Christoph Wagenseil wrote for children; and Herrad of Landsberg, abbess of Hohenburg, wrote for her nuns. Encyclopædia Britannica was designed for the use of the curious and intelligent layman. The editor of The Columbia Encyclopedia in 1935 tried to provide a work that was compact enough and written simply enough to serve as a guide to the “young Abraham Lincoln.” The Jesuit Michael Pexenfelder made his intended audience clear enough by writing his Apparatus Eruditionis (1670; “Apparatus of Learning”) in the form of a series of conversations between teacher and pupil. St. Isidore addressed himself not only to the needs of his former pupils in the episcopal school but also to the needs of all the priests and monks for whom he was responsible. At the same time, he hoped to provide the newly converted population of Spain with a national culture that would enable it to hold its own in the Byzantine world.

Contributors

In sympathy with many of their various ends, many scholars have contributed to encyclopaedias. Not all their contributions are known, because until the mid- to late 20th century it was not the custom to sign articles. It is known, however, that the English encyclopaedist John Harris enlisted the help of such scientists as John Ray and Sir Isaac Newton for his Lexicon Technicum (1704) and that Rees’s New Cyclopædia (1802–20) included articles on music by the English organist and music historian Charles Burney and on botany by the English botanist Sir J.E. Smith. Illustrious Frenchmen such as Voltaire, Rousseau, Condorcet, Montesquieu, and Georges Boulanger contributed to the Encyclopédie; Thomas Macaulay, T.E. Lawrence, and more than 100 recipients of Nobel Prizes—including Albert Einstein and Marie Curie—to the Britannica; the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster and the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted to The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1808–30); the English astronomer Sir William Herschel and the English mathematician and mechanical genius Charles Babbage to the Metropolitana; the Russian Communist leader Lenin to the Granat encyclopaedia; and the dictator Benito Mussolini to the Enciclopedia italiana.

Language

The language of Western encyclopaedias was almost exclusively Latin up to the time of the first printed works. As with most scholarly writings, the use of Latin was advantageous because it made works available internationally on a wide scale and thus promoted unlimited sharing of information. On the other hand, it made the contents of encyclopaedias inaccessible to the great majority of people. Consequently, there was from the early days on a movement to translate the more important encyclopaedias into various vernaculars. Honorius Inclusus’s Imago mundi (c. 1122; “Image of the World”) was rendered into French, Italian, and Spanish; Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum (1220–40; “On the Characteristics of Things”) into English; the Dominican friar Thomas de Cantimpré’s De natura rerum (c. 1228–44; “On the Nature of Things”) into Flemish and German; and Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum majus (“The Greater Mirror”) into French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Catalan. In later years the more successful encyclopaedias were translated from one vernacular into another. Moréri’s encyclopaedia, Le Grand Dictionnaire historique, was translated into both English and German. The German Brockhaus appeared in a Russian translation (1890–1907), and the French Petit Larousse had several foreign-language editions. Nevertheless, an encyclopaedia, however successful in its own country, may find acceptance in another country far from easy.

The contemporary world

Encyclopaedias have often reflected fairly accurately the civilization in which they appeared; that this was deliberate is shown by the frequency with which the earlier compilers included such words as speculum (“mirror”), imago (“image”), and so forth in their titles. Thus, as early as the 2nd century the Greek scholar Julius Pollux was already defining current technical terms in his Onomastikon. In the 13th century Vincent of Beauvais quoted the ideas of both pagan and Christian philosophers freely and without differentiation, for their statements often agreed on questions of morals. In doing so, he reflected the rapidly widening horizons of a period that saw the founding of so many universities. Bartholomaeus Anglicus devoted a considerable part of his work to psychology and medicine. Theophilus (thought to be Roger of Helmarshausen, a Benedictine monk) as early as the 12th century gave a clear and practical account in his De diversis artibus (“On Diverse Arts”) of contemporary processes used in painting, glassmaking and decoration, metalworking, bone carving, and the working of precious stones, even listing the necessary tools and conditions for successful operations. Pierre Bayle, a French philosopher and critic, showed in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; “Historical and Critical Dictionary”) how the scientific renaissance of the previous 40 years had revolutionized contemporary thought. To every detail he applied a mercilessly scientific and inquiring mind that challenged the assumptions and blind reverence for authority that had characterized most of his predecessors.

At that point in history, much attention was being paid to practical matters: the statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert himself directed the French Académie des Sciences (1675) to produce a work that eventually appeared as the Description et perfection des arts et métiers (1761; “Description and Perfection of the Arts and Crafts”). The German Meyer’s Grosses Konversations-Lexicon from the first edition (1840–55) onward paid particular attention to scientific and technical developments, and the Encyclopedia Americana, aided by the Scientific American, strengthened its coverage in this area from 1911 onward. In its very first edition the Encyclopædia Britannica included lengthy articles containing detailed instructions on such topics as surgery, bookkeeping, and many aspects of farming. Similarly, The New Cyclopaedia, in the early 19th century, incorporated articles on subjects such as candle making and coach building.

The outstanding example of a completely contemporary encyclopaedia was, of course, the Encyclopédie, in which Diderot, the mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, and their friends set out to reject much of the heritage of the past in favour of the scientific discoveries and the more advanced thought of their own age. Their decision in this respect was both intellectually and commercially successful. Since that time every edition of any good encyclopaedia has the additional merit of being a valuable source for the thought and attitudes of the people for whom it was published.

Encyclopaedias and politics

All great encyclopaedia makers have tried to be truthful and to present a balanced picture of civilization as they knew it, although it is probable that no encyclopaedia is totally unbiased. A great encyclopaedia is inevitably a sign of national maturity and, as such, it will often pay tribute to the ideals of its country and its times. The first Hungarian encyclopaedia, János Apáczai Csere’s Magyar encyclopaedia (1653–55), was mostly a summary of what was available in foreign works, but the Révai nagy lexikona (1911–35; “Révai’s Great Lexicon”) was a handsome tribute to Hungary’s emergence as a country in its own right, just as the Enciklopedija Jugoslavije (first published 1955–71) did full justice to the advances made by Yugoslavia in the mid-20th century. The supreme example of an encyclopaedia that set out to present the best possible image of its people and the wealth and stature of their culture is undoubtedly the Enciclopedia italiana (1929–36). Mussolini’s contribution of an article on fascism indicates the extent to which the work might be regarded as an ideological tool, but, in fact, most of its contents are international and objective in approach. The various encyclopaedias of the Soviet Union occupy many feet of shelf space, with the later editions each devoting one complete volume to the Soviet Union in all its aspects. Though successive editions of the Bolshaya Sovetskaya entsiklopediya (“Great Soviet Encyclopaedia”) were notable for the obvious political factors that were responsible for the inclusion and exclusion of entries for famous nationals according to the state of their acceptance or condemnation by the existing regime, many critics felt that the third edition (1970–78) was somewhat less ideological than any of the others in this regard.

Diderot, the editor, and André-François Le Breton, the publisher, faced such opposition from both church and state in their publication of the Encyclopédie (1751–65) that many of the volumes were secretly printed, and the last 10 were issued with a false imprint. In the early part of the 19th century, Brockhaus was condemned by the Austrian censor, and in 1950 its 11th edition was branded as reactionary by the East German government. Nor was political censorship the only form of oppression in the world of encyclopaedias. Antoine Furetière, on issuing his prospectus (1675) for his Dictionnaire universel, found his privilege to publish cancelled by the French government at the request of the Académie Française, which accused him of plagiarizing its own dictionary. The Leipzig book trade, fearing that publication of Johann Heinrich Zedler’s huge Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon (1732–50; “Great Complete Universal Lexicon”) might put them out of business, made such difficulties that Zedler thought it best to issue his work in Halle.

The reader’s needs

People look to encyclopaedias to give them an adequate introduction to a topic that interests them. Many expect an encyclopaedia to omit nothing and to include consideration of all controversial aspects of a subject. Encyclopaedia makers of the past assumed that there was a large public willing to read through an entire encyclopaedia if it was not too large. In the 18th century, for example, there was a good market for pocket-size compendia for the traveler, or for the courtier to browse in as he waited for an audience. Thus, although most encyclopaedias are multivolume works, there are many small works ranging from the Didascalion (c. 1128; “Teaching”) of the Scholastic philosopher and mystic theologian Hugh of Saint-Victor, through Gregor Reisch’s Margarita philosophica (1496; “The Philosophical Pearl”) and the French writer Pons-Augustin Alletz’s Petite Encyclopédie (1766), to C.T. Watkins’s Portable Cyclopædia (1817). The last was issued by a remarkable publisher, Sir Richard Phillips, who realized the great demand for pocket-size compendia and drove a thriving trade in issuing a number of these; he is thought to have written large sections of these himself.

Royalty and encyclopaedias

Most of the classic Chinese encyclopaedias owe their existence to the patronage of emperors. In the West the Roman scholar Pliny dedicated his Historia naturalis (“Natural History”) to the emperor Titus, and Julius Pollux dedicated his Onomastikon to his former pupil, the Roman emperor Commodus. The Byzantine philosopher and politician Michael Psellus dedicated his De omnifaria doctrina (“On All Sorts of Teaching”) to his former pupil the emperor Michael VII Ducas, ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire. Gervase of Tilbury, an English ecclesiastic, compiled his Otia imperialia (“Imperial Pastimes”) for the Holy Roman emperor Otto IV, and Alfonso de la Torre prepared his Visiõ delectable for Prince Carlos of Viana. St. Isidore dedicated his encyclopaedia to the Visigothic king Sisebut, and the French king Louis IX patronized Vincent of Beauvais’s Speculum majus. Nor did kings eschew the work of compiling encyclopaedias. The emperor Constantine VII of the Eastern Roman Empire was responsible for a series of encyclopaedias, and Alfonso X of Spain organized the making of the Grande e general estoria (“Great and General History”).

Contents and authority

The extent to which readers have been dependent on editorial decisions concerning not only what to include but also what to exclude has yet to be explored in detail. For example, Vincent of Beauvais rarely mentioned the pagan and Christian legends that were so popular in his day. The anonymous compiler of the scholarly Compendium philosophiae (c. 1316; “Compendium of Philosophy”) was careful to omit the credulous tales that appeared in contemporary bestiaries. For many centuries it was not considered right to include biographies of men and women who were still alive. And the early Romans, such as Cato, rejected much of Greek theoretical knowledge, regarding it as a dangerous foreign influence and believing with the Stoics that wisdom consisted in living according to nature’s precepts.

Whatever the compiler did decide to include had a far-reaching influence. Pliny’s vast Historia naturalis has survived intact because for so many centuries it symbolized human knowledge, and even the “old wives’ tales” it injudiciously included were unquestioningly copied into many later encyclopaedias. The influence of St. Isidore’s work can be traced in writings as late as the collection of travelers’ tales first published in French in the 1350s and attributed to Sir John Mandeville and to the 14th-century Confessio amantis (“A Lover’s Confession”) of the English poet John Gower. Honorius’s Imago mundi is known to have influenced some of the German medieval chronicles and the Norse saga of Olaf Tryggvason. The main source of classics such as the Roman de la rose (“Romance of the Rose”), the Alexander romances, Archbishop Giovanni da Colonna’s Liber de viris illustribus (“Book Concerning Illustrious Men”), and the recorded lives of the saints can be traced to the Speculum majus. The direct and indirect influence of the critical encyclopaedias of Bayle and Diderot is, of course, incalculable.

The length of encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic articles

There always have been and there still are a number of successful one-volume encyclopaedias. Outstanding examples of the 20th century include The Columbia Encyclopedia, the Petit Larousse, Hutchinson’s New Twentieth Century Encyclopedia, and the Random House Encyclopedia. In the Random House set the contents were divided into two sections, a Colorpedia, composed of relatively lengthy articles dealing with broad topics, and an Alphapedia, composed of concise entries on very specific subjects. Some booksellers and publishers confirm that there is, however unreasonably, a certain amount of public prejudice against the single-volume form and that most people prefer a multivolume work. Throughout the entire history of encyclopaedias there has been much variation in the number of volumes. Many of the Chinese encyclopaedias have been considerably larger than any Western work. Pliny’s Historia naturalis comprised about 2,500 chapters, Zedler’s Universal-Lexicon was planned for 12 volumes and eventually filled 64; the publishers of the Encyclopédie were faced with a lawsuit (1768–78) for producing a 26-volume encyclopaedia instead of the 10 volumes they had promised; Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber’s German Allgemeine Encyclopädie (“General Encyclopaedia”) had already reached 167 volumes at the time of its discontinuance; and the major Soviet encyclopaedia consisted of more than 50 volumes. Today most print encyclopaedias range between 20 and 30 volumes, occupying between three and four feet (about a metre) of shelf space. Thus, the modern encyclopaedia appears smaller than its 19th-century counterpart, but, in fact, the content may be greater because the thick mat paper of Victorian times has been replaced by a thinner paper capable of reproducing colour and black-and-white halftone illustrations with sharp definition.

Even more noticeable than variations in the number of volumes in encyclopaedias has been an even greater variation in the average lengths of articles within those volumes. The 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica contained almost twice as many articles as the last significant edition before it, but it contained only 15 or 16 percent more words. The difference had to do with editorial considerations regarding the matter of fragmentation. Although most of the major encyclopaedias of the past had devoted considerable space to any topic of major importance, there was increasing recognition in the 19th century that an alternative method of treatment would be to break large subjects into their constituent subtopics for alphabetical distribution throughout the set. Those who favoured this more fragmented approach argued that by focusing on the smaller part of the whole, the editors could facilitate the user’s search for specific information and that the liberal provision of cross-references would facilitate a recombination of the fragments by those interested in the bigger picture. Against this practice, it was argued that most cross-references are not followed up by most readers, that the shorter fragmented pieces work against a correct understanding of the larger subject, and that fragmentation inevitably involved a great amount of repetition of basic information throughout all the related articles. Nevertheless, Brockhaus, Meyer, Larousse, and other encyclopaedias of the shorter-entry type have had and continue to have a strong following.

Authorship

The first encyclopaedia makers had no doubts concerning their ability to compile their works single-handedly. Cassiodorus, Honorius Inclusus (or Solitarius), and Vincent of Beauvais fully justified this attitude, though their task was largely that of the anthologist. Vincent and many other encyclopaedists employed both scribes and scholars to help them in their work, but, once the encyclopaedia reached the stage of independent writing, it was clear that the editorial task was going to become more complex. Even so, some of the later pocket encyclopaedias—such as the English bookseller John Dunton’s mediocre Ladies’ Dictionary (1694), An Universal History of Arts and Sciences (1745) by the French-born Englishman Chevalier Denis de Coëtlogon, and the popular Allgemeines Lexicon (1721; “General Lexicon”) by the Prussian scholar Johann Theodor Jablonski—were substantially or almost wholly the work of a single author; such items are, however, negligible.

John Harris, an English theologian and scientist, may have been one of the first to enlist the aid of experts, such as the naturalist John Ray and Sir Isaac Newton, in compiling his Lexicon Technicum (1704; “Technical Lexicon”). Johann Heinrich Zedler, in his Universal-Lexicon (1732–50), went further by enlisting the help of two general editors, supported by nine specialist editors, the result being a gigantic work of great accuracy. The French Encyclopédie, the largest encyclopaedia issued at that time, inevitably had many contributors, although the French writer Voltaire said that Diderot’s collaborator, the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (aided by secretaries), contributed about three-quarters of the articles in that work. The pattern for future encyclopaedias was established: for any substantial work, it would be necessary not only to have contributions from the experts of the day, but it would also be essential to have subject editors who could supervise the coverage and content in each area of knowledge.

Encyclopaedia adjuncts

The readers of modern encyclopaedias are rarely aware of the numerous aids that have been provided to make their search for information so easy and efficient. Only when recourse is had to one of the older encyclopaedias does the reader become conscious of the advances that have been made. In former days it was often difficult to distinguish between one article and the next, because distinctive headings or inset titles or the use of boldface was rare. Nor was the necessity for running titles or alphabetical notations at the head of the pages fully appreciated. Even more troublesome was the problem of the arrangement of entries for several persons of the same name; reference to the older encyclopaedias under such headings as “Henry,” “John,” or “Louis”—names held by both princes and religious potentates—will show how little the art of acceptable arrangement was understood.

Illustrative material

The use of illustrations in encyclopaedias goes back almost certainly to St. Isidore’s time. One of the most beautiful examples of an illustrated encyclopaedia was the abbess Herrad’s 12th-century Hortus deliciarum. In many earlier encyclopaedias the illustrations were often more decorative than useful, but from the end of the 17th century the better encyclopaedias began to include engraved plates of great accuracy and some of great beauty. The Encyclopédie is particularly distinguished for its superb volume of plates—reprinted in the 20th century. In modern times the trend has been toward more lavish illustration of encyclopaedias, including elaborate coloured anatomical plates with superimposed layers, and specially inset small coloured halftones, as well as marginal line drawings. With the advent of electronic delivery of databases, intricate animations and audio and video clips became common features of online and disc-based encyclopaedias.

The level of writing

The American editor Franklin H. Hooper, undaunted by his own lack of scholarship, took a notable part in ensuring that the articles of the 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica were kept within the mental range of the average reader. The problem of the encyclopaedist has always been to strike the right mean between too learned and too simplified an approach. The Roman Cassiodorus wrote his encyclopaedia to provide a bridge between his unlettered monks and the scholarly books he had preserved for their use. Hugh of Saint-Victor, the theologian and philosopher, achieved one of the best approaches in his charming Didascalion (c. 1128), in which he used an elegant and simple style that everyone could appreciate. The abbess Herrad, knowing her audience, described in didactic fashion the history of the world (with emphasis on biblical stories) and its content, with commentaries and beautifully coloured miniatures designed to help and edify the nuns in her charge. The master of Dante, Brunetto Latini, wanted to reach the Italian cultured and mercantile classes with his Li livres dou trésor (c. 1264; “Treasure Books”) and therefore used a concise and accurate style that evoked an immediate and general welcome. Gregor Reisch managed to cover the whole university course of the day in his brief Margarita philosophica, which correctly interpreted the taste of the younger generation at the end of the 15th century.

Until the 17th century a great many encyclopaedias had been written by clerics for clerics, and further examples continued to be published. After that time, more popular works began to be published as well, particularly in France, where such palatable compilations as the Sieur Saunier’s Encyclopédie des beaux esprits (1657; “Encyclopaedia of Great Minds”) had an immediate success. The philosopher Pierre Bayle in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) introduced the lay reader to the necessity of reading more critically; in this his work constituted a forerunner of the Encyclopédie, with its challenges to many undiscriminating assumptions about religion and politics, history and government. On the other hand, the contemporary Dictionnaire universel of the Jesuit fathers of Trévoux had a popularity among the orthodox that caused it to run through six editions and then gradually to expand from three to eight volumes between 1704 and 1771.

Supplementary material

The idea of keeping encyclopaedias up-to-date by means of supplements, yearbooks, and so on, dates back more than two centuries. In 1753 a two-volume supplement to the 7th edition of Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia was compiled by George Lewis Scott, a tutor to the English royal family. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, a publisher, issued a four-volume supplement to the Encyclopédie (1776–77), in spite of Diderot’s refusal to edit it. The Britannica included a 200-page appendix in the last volume of the 2nd edition (1784) and issued a two-volume supplement to the 3rd edition (1801; reprinted 1803). Brockhaus broke new ground by issuing in monthly parts (1857–64) a yearbook to the 10th edition (1851–55), which, on the commencement of the issue of the 11th edition, changed its name to Unsere Zeit (“Our Times”) and doubled its frequency (1865–74). In 1907 Larousse began publication of the Larousse mensuel illustré (“Monthly Illustrated Larousse”). The New International Encyclopaedia issued a yearbook from 1908 (retrospective to 1903), and the Britannica issued one yearbook in 1913 and recommenced with the Britannica Book of the Year in 1938. The publication of supplements has a much longer history in China, but the system on which the Chinese operated was very different from that of the West. By the second half of the 20th century, yearbooks had become a common feature of most general encyclopaedias. In the main, they proved more effective in recording the events and discoveries of each year than keeping the main articles up-to-date. They also performed an essential duty in informing their readers of much that was not reported or that was only inadequately reported in the press; at the same time, they provided a more reasoned assessment and perspective than the daily newspapers and the weekly commentaries could usually achieve.

Some of the leading encyclopaedias offered additional services during the second half of the 20th century that provided the reader with the expert guidance necessary to get the best from a modern encyclopaedia’s complex contents. To this end, small subject guides were sometimes issued, which in narrative form outlined the whole field and brought each topic into perspective, drawing attention to the appropriate articles that would throw further light on the matter. A research service was another supplementary feature offered by some established encyclopaedias. Through such services, purchasers were permitted to submit a limited number of questions about topics either not dealt with in the set or dealt with inadequately. These services were provided in a variety of ways. In some cases, frequently asked questions were answered with previously prepared reports listed in the publisher’s catalog; in others, questions were referred to a special office staff for answers culled from the publisher’s own databases; in still others, they were referred to researchers stationed at selected specialized libraries.

Other supplementary material sometimes issued by encyclopaedias ranged from 10-year illustrated surveys of events to sets of books considered to have had a major impact on humankind. Although few publishers included dictionaries as an integral part of their encyclopaedia, they frequently supplied a well-known, independently compiled work as part of their service. During the last quarter of the 20th century, it became an increasingly common custom for an encyclopaedia to incorporate an atlas and a gazetteer, often in the last volume.

Problems of encyclopaedias