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For many writers and researchers Wikipedia is a heaven-sent first port of call for information. But what these fact hunters may not realize is the remarkable history of reference books. It starts more than 2,000 years ago, when some ancient Romans and Greeks started to write down what they knew. And it was a long journey until today, with millions of minds exchanging information in virtual space.
The Othmer Library holds some of the milestones in the history of encyclopedias.
The word as we know it: 18th-century encyclopedias
A little more than 300 years ago English clergyman John Harris felt the need to write the first reference work focusing solely on science – his Lexicon technicum (1704) – and to write it in a particular form: Harris noticed that he had trouble finding information even in the most recent reference works. He solved this problem by arranging his extensive articles in an alphabetical order and added instructive illustrations to the mixture. Each subject (ranging from mathematics to geography to anatomy) got its own alphabet in this Lexicon (literally, dictionary). Thus, with much labor the first alphabetical English encyclopedia was born.
But it was Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopaedia: or, An universal dictionary of arts and sciences (1728) that would go down in history as the archetypal English encyclopedia. Chambers was an apprentice to a globe maker in London when he started gathering facts about everything under the sun. He soon left his daytime occupation to put his full energy into compiling, as the subtitle explains, this
universal dictionary of arts and sciences: containing the definitions of the terms, and accounts of the things signify'd thereby, in the several arts, both liberal and mechanical, and the several sciences, human and divine: the figures, kinds, properties, productions, preparations, and uses, of things natural and artificial; the rise, progress, and state of things ecclesiastical, civil, military, and commercial: with the several systems, sects, opinions, &c; among philosophers, divines, mathematicians, physicians, antiquaries, criticks, &c.
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| Ephraim Chambers, A supplement to Mr. Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1753) |
Published in order to educate Georgian Englishmen and -women, the Cyclopedia also contains the archetypes of those cross-references so familiar to us in the form of Web links, indicating the connections between articles. Chambers understood very well how we order new pieces of information and make sense of them by connecting them in our heads.
The best thing since French toast: the Encyclopédie
When Chambers’s Cyclopaedia was published, two French messieurs could not leave well enough alone: they set out to translate Chambers’s work into French and to add a little more information (even though the 1738 edition of the Cyclopaedia already contained 2,500 pages, and a supplement written over the next two decades added another 3,300 pages). Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie swelled to 28 volumes published between 1751 and 1766, with more later on.
The scientific articles and plates in this Encyclopédie are quite wonderful, not least owing to the social commentary peeping through between the lines. Consider, for example, the entry on “cosmology,” which, after addressing the contemporary disagreements about Pierre Louis Maupertius’s theories, their originality, and the place of God in the cosmos, concludes,
This quarrel . . . , if it is permitted for us to say, has gathered certain religious overtones due to its acerbic nature, and by a quantity of people that have spoken without listening.
Many other historical treasures are hidden throughout the work, like this entry on French sauces:
Our modern sauces are rather known, but perhaps it will be helpful to find here some of the cooking sauces of our ancestors that Monsieur Sauval has described in his antiquities of Paris. These sauces are yellow sauce, hot sauce, compote sauce, mustard sauce or galantine, sauce rapée, green sauce , and finally camelaine . . . , which took its name from medicinal plant we no longer know, it was made with cinnamon, ginger, cloves, mustard seed, wine, verjuice, bread, and vinegar. As such it was the most complex of all the sauces of that time.
Altogether, the Encyclopédie is a tasty and imperishable addition to the history of encyclopedias.
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Margarita philosophica (1503)
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Renaissance precursors: the Margarita philosophica
Knowledge was not always organized in alphabetical form with cross-references. Instead, the oldest and most famous early reference works, like Pliny the Elder’s famous Naturalis hystoriae [History of Nature] (written in the 1st century BCE), are organized by subject. Pliny gives detailed descriptions of the natural world in mathematical and physical terms, its geography and ethnography, anthropology and human physiology, zoology, botany, pharmacology, mining, and mineralogy, in sequence, and thereby created the ur-type of all encyclopedias.
Those who were thirsty for knowledge in medieval and Renaissance Europe were likely to be university educated, and the university system was much more familiar, and important, to them than the alphabet. With time some university textbooks went beyond the material covered in university lectures, and the German Margarita philosophica [Philosophical Pearl] (1503) is among the most astounding and beautiful in this category. Illustrated with numerous woodcuts that distill the concept and history of the arts and sciences into emblematic pictures, the Margarita covers much natural philosophy, including the elements, meteorology, alchemy, plants and animals, optics, and, beyond nature, heaven, hell, and purgatory.
No matter what century they were written in, encyclopedias have been a good teacher and intellectual insurance for many men and women. And even today, when information is just a mouse click away, it still pays to check them out for some historical wonder.
Bibliography and further reading
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