(previously SVEC)
The Maurists’ unfinished encyclopedia
LINN HOLMBERG
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UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
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The Maurists’ unfinished encyclopedia
LINN HOLMBERG
In this groundbreaking study, Linn Holmberg provides new perspectives on
the Enlightenment ‘dictionary wars’ and offers a fascinating insight into the
intellectual reorientation of a monastic community in the Age of Reason.
In
mid-eighteenth-century
Paris,
two
Benedictine
monks
from
the
Congregation of Saint-Maur – also known as the Maurists – began working
on a universal dictionary of arts, crafts, and sciences. At the same time,
Diderot and D’Alembert started to compile the famous Encyclopédie. The
Benedictines, however, never finished or published their work and the
manuscripts were left, forgotten, in the monastery archive. In the first study
devoted to the Maurists’ unfinished encyclopedia, Holmberg explores the
project’s origins, development, and abandonment and sheds new light on
the intellectual activities of its creators, the emergence of the encyclopedic
dictionary in France, and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and D’Alembert.
Holmberg adopts a multidisciplinary approach to the challenges of studying
a hitherto unexplored and incomplete manuscript. By using codicology and
handwriting analysis, the author reconstructs the drafts’ order of production,
estimates the number of compilers and the nature of their work, and
detects comprehensive editorial interferences made by nineteenth-century
conservators at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Holmberg’s meticulous
work proves, with textual evidence, the Maurist dictionary’s origins as an
augmented translation of a mathematical dictionary by Christian Wolff.
Through comparing the Maurists’ manuscripts to the Encyclopédie and the
Jesuits’ Dictionnaire de Trévoux, the author highlights striking similarities
between the Benedictine project and that of Diderot and D’Alembert,
showing that the philosophes were neither first with their encyclopedic
innovations, nor alone in their secular Enlightenment endeavours.
1. Introduction
2. The Maurists’ manuscripts under the loupe
3. The history of a dictionary in the making
4. The Maurists’ manuscripts compared
5. The Maurist enterprise and Enlightenment thought
Appendix 1: nomenclature
Appendix 2: working lists
Appendix 3: illustrations
Appendix 4: fields of knowledge
Appendix 5: transcriptions and translations
Bibliography
Index
Linn Holmberg is a historian of science and ideas at Stockholm University.
Her main areas of research are Enlightenment encyclopedism and earlymodern knowledge practices.
Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, February 2017
ISBN 978-0-7294-1191-2, xvi+314 pages, 12 ills, £70 / €90 / $95
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