Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture

ISBN-13: 9780521651912 / Angielski / Twarda / 2001 / 358 str.

Deborah Brandt; Richard R. Yeo

Opis

The eighteenth-century English dictionaries of arts and sciences claimed to contain all knowledge that a person of education should possess. 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 specialization of science. He examines assumptions about the organization, communication, and control of knowledge in these works. Elegantly illustrated and clearly written, Encyclopaedic Visions provides a major contribution to Enlightenment studies, the history of science, and the history of ideas in general.

Recenzje

Review of the hardback: 'It is a wonderful virtue of Yeo's work that it uses one text to cut across so many pressing problems of Enlightenment science and literary culture … a fundamentally groundbreaking work.' Brill

Spis treści

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.