Enfilade

The latest from the Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment series:

Jeff Loveland and Stéphane Schmitt, eds., Specialized Dictionaries and Encyclopedias, 1650–1800: A Tribute to Frank Kafker (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation with Liverpool University Press, 2024), 488 pages, ISBN: 978-1837641468, $99.

• One of the first books to focus on specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias
• Complements case studies of specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias with a wide-ranging, analytical overview
• Covers a largely neglected but extremely important aspect of European encyclopedism
• Brings the history of specialized lexicography into touch with the history of science, book history, and the history of culture

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the number of specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias grew from a trickle to a flood, while the number of disciplines they were devoted to grew from a handful to dozens, representing many varieties of knowledge. Specialized dictionaries—as most were called, whether lexical or encyclopedic—were far more numerous than general encyclopedias. Yet despite their importance—as sources of knowledge, for example, and as definers of disciplines—they have not been much studied. Drawing on Frank Kafker’s methods for studying the period’s general encyclopedias, as pioneered in Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1981), this volume examines specialized dictionaries as commercial products, collections of content, and cultural artifacts. Specifically, it complements a wide-ranging, analytical introduction sketching out the characteristics of specialized dictionaries in general with a series of individually authored but standardized case studies. The latter deal with dictionaries on a variety of disciplines, from the Bible to mining, and in five European languages. The volume concludes with an essay on Frank Kafker’s influence on historiography.

Jeff Loveland is a visiting assistant professor of history at Utah Tech University. Much of his research concerns the history of encyclopedias, especially eighteenth-century European encyclopedias. His publications include The Early Britannica, 1768–1803, co-edited with Frank A. Kafker (2009) and The European Encyclopedia, from 1650 to the Twenty-First Century (2019).

Stéphane Schmitt is a research director at the Archives Henri Poincaré (French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Nancy. He works on the history of the life sciences, especially in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. He has published many books and papers on the history of anatomy, embryology, and zoology, and is the main editor of Buffon’s Oeuvres completes (2007–, 17 volumes published to date).

c o n t e n t s

List of illustrations
Introduction
Appendix

• Augustin Calmet’s Dictionnaire historique, critique, chronologique, géographique et littéral de la Bible (1719) — Kathleen Hardesty Doig
• Étienne Chauvin’s Lexicon rationale (1692) and Lexicon philosophicum (1713) — Giuliano Gasparri
• A Medicinal Dictionary (1742–45) by Robert James: An Enlightenment Reference Work — Alexander Wright and R. W. McConchie
• John Barrow’s Dictionarium Polygraphicum (1735) — Craig Hanson
• Noël Chomel’s Dictionnaire oeconomique (1708) — Clorinda Donato
• The Dictionnaire raisonné universel d’histoire naturelle (1764) — Stéphane Schmitt
• The Reales Staats- und Zeitungs-Lexicon (1704) — Jeff Loveland
• The Curieuses Natur- Kunst- Gewerck- und Handlungs-Lexicon (1712) — Ines Prodöhl
• The Dictionnaire universel de commerce (1723–30) — Jeff Loveland
• Nicolas Desroche’s Dictionaire des termes propres de marine (1687): A Linguistic Tool for Seafarers? — Élisabeth Ridel-Granger and Michel Daeffler
• Sven Rinman’s Bergwerks Lexicon (1788–89) and the Emergence of Mining Encyclopedias in Preindustrial Europe — Linn Holmberg
• Frank Kafker and the Social History of Eighteenth-Century Encyclopedism — Gregory S. Brown and Melanie Conroy

Bibliography