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

Published by Johns Hopkins UP, First Among Men was awarded the George Washington Prize last fall:

Maurizio Valsania, First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022), 416 pages, ISBN: 978-1421444475, $32.

George Washington—hero of the French and Indian War, commander in chief of the Continental Army, and first president of the United States—died on December 14, 1799. The myth-making began immediately thereafter, and the Washington mythos crafted after his death remains largely intact. But what do we really know about Washington as an upper-class man?

Washington is frequently portrayed by his biographers as America at its unflinching best: tall, shrewd, determined, resilient, stalwart, and tremendously effective in action. But this aggressive and muscular version of Washington is largely a creation of the nineteenth century. Eighteenth-century ideals of upper-class masculinity would have preferred a man with refined aesthetic tastes, graceful and elegant movements, and the ability and willingness to clearly articulate his emotions. At the same time, these eighteenth-century men subjected themselves to intense hardship and inflicted incredible amounts of violence on each other, their families, their neighbors, and the people they enslaved. In First Among Men: George Washington and the Myth of American Masculinity, Valsania considers Washington’s complexity and apparent contradictions in three main areas: his physical life (often bloody, cold, injured, muddy, or otherwise unpleasant), his emotional world (sentimental, loving, and affectionate), and his social persona (carefully constructed and maintained). In each, he notes, the reality diverges from the legend quite drastically. Ultimately, Valsania challenges readers to reconsider what they think they know about Washington.

Aided by new research, documents, and objects that have only recently come to light, First Among Men tells the fascinating story of a living and breathing person who loved, suffered, moved, gestured, dressed, ate, drank, and had sex in ways that may be surprising to many Americans. In this accessible, detailed narrative, Valsania presents a full, complete portrait of Washington as readers have rarely seen him before: as a man, a son, a father, and a friend.

Maurizio Valsania is a professor of American history at the University of Turin. He is the author of Jefferson’s Body: A Corporeal Biography.

c o n t e n t s

1  The American Giant

Part I | Physical
2  Testing Himself
3  A Taste for Cruelty and War
4  A Body in Pain
5  Checking the Body

Part II | Emotional
6  The Love Letters
7  The Meaning of Love (and Marriage)
8  A Sentimental Male
9  A Maternal Father

Part III | Social
10  A Person of Fine Manners
11  The Message of His Clothing
12  Astride the Great Stage
13  Consummation
14  Giants Die as Well

From the University of Delaware Press:

Pamela Buck, Objects of Liberty: British Women Writers and Revolutionary Souvenirs (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2024), 202 pages, ISBN: 978-16445333338 (hardback), $150 / ISBN: 978-1644533321 (paperback), $43.

While souvenir collecting was a standard practice of privileged men on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour, women began to partake in this endeavor as political events in France heightened interest in travel to the Continent. Objects of Liberty: British Women Writers and Revolutionary Souvenirs explores the prevalence of souvenirs in British women’s writing during the French Revolution and Napoleonic era. It argues that women writers employed the material and memorial object of the souvenir to circulate revolutionary ideas and engage in the masculine realm of political debate. Looking at travel accounts by Helen Maria Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Catherine and Martha Wilmot, Charlotte Eaton, and Mary Shelley, this study reveals how they used souvenirs to affect political thought in Britain and contribute to conversations about individual and national identity. Objects of Liberty is a story about the ways that women established political power and agency through material culture. Easily transported across borders due to their small size, souvenirs allowed women to provide visual representations of the distant conflict in France and encourage sympathy for and remembrance of revolutionary ideals. At a time when gendered beliefs precluded women from full citizenship, they used souvenirs to redefine themselves as legitimate political actors. By establishing networks of sociability, women’s exchange of souvenirs helped Britain develop international alliances and redefine itself as a more powerful and global nation.

Pamela Buck is Associate Professor of English at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut. Her research focuses primarily on women’s writing and material culture in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British literature.

c o n t e n t s

List of Figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction
1  Helen Maria Williams’ Sentimental Objects in Letters from France
2  Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Spectacle in An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
3  Imperial Collecting in Catherine and Martha Wilmot’s Travel Journals
4  Charlotte Eaton’s Battlefield Relics in Narrative of a Residence in Belgium
Conclusion: Refiguring the Revolution in Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy

Notes
Bibliography
Index