Stranded Encyclopedias, 1700–2000

Influential publications have long occupied central positions in histories of literature, philosophy, and science. The history of encyclopedias is no exception. With the ongoing digitization and increasing accessibility of historically important reference works, this trend is in fact still being reinforced. In this chapter, however, Linn Holmberg argues that by shifting our attention from successful publications to projects that somehow “failed,” we can deepen our understanding of modern encyclopedic practice—its development, challenges, motivations, and geographical expansion. Here, the concepts of stranded and strandedness can function as simple yet powerful analytical tools to compare cases where intellectual ambitions and practical outcomes have parted ways, and to explore the complex relationships between the finished and the unfinished, the printed and the non-printed, the complete and the uncomplete, the updated and the outdated, as well as the successfully and unsuccessfully disseminated. After all, all human undertakings run the risk of being stranded—of not reaching a desired destination, or of not being fulfilled as planned. Studying stranded encyclopedias means taking seriously the many obstacles facing those who pursue complete knowledge, and uncovering what it takes for large-scale enterprises to be realized and made public in various historical contexts.

In this chapter, Annelie Grosse reconstructs the nature and history of a stranded encyclopedia incorporated into the famous Encyclopédie edited by the French philosophers Denis Diderot and Jean D’Alembert. The Huguenot pastor and scholar Jean Henri Samuel Formey (1711–1797) is nowadays best known for his role as the secretary of the Berlin Academy of Science, his wide-ranging correspondence, and his defense of Christianity against the heretical writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Diderot. Less familiar is his involvement with the Encyclopédie, the very symbol of Enlightenment rationalism and criticism of dogma. Between 1742 and 1747, Formey worked on his own philosophical dictionary but ended up selling the almost finished work to the publishers of the Encyclopédie. On the basis of his correspondence and the printed text of the Encyclopédie, Grosse first elucidates Formey’s concept of encyclopedism, his role models and his practices. Thereafter she reevaluates the motives and circumstances of the abandonment of his dictionary and its subsequent stranding in the emerging Parisian encyclopedia. Lastly, she briefly analyses the multi-faceted appropriation of Formey’s manuscript by the Encyclopédie’s editors. In this way, besides presenting Formey’s stranded encyclopedia, Grosse provides new perspectives on the nature and production history of the Encyclopédie.

In 1769, the French economist, writer, and former contributor to the Encyclopédie of Diderot, the Abbé Morellet (1727–1819), published a prospectus of a new economical encyclopedia: the Nouveau dictionnaire de commerce. It was intended to replace Savary des Bruslons’ Dictionnaire universel de commerce (1723, last edition 1765) which had been the number one reference-work in the economic field in Europe for half a century. For different reasons—personal, financial, conceptual, and historical—Morellet’s encyclopedia was not realized. In the eyes of the author, the subscribers, and the public, the project was therefore a failure. Nevertheless, Lüsebrink shows that Morellet’s encyclopedia had a surprising and influential afterlife: twenty years later, it formed the basis of the Dictionnaire universel de la géographie commerçante (1799–1799, 5 vols.) edited by Jacques Peuchet (1758–1830), a former collaborator of Morellet who adapted, reconceived, and transformed a stranded project into a new and in some ways groundbreaking economic encyclopedia.

Italy’s woes as a maligned and misrepresented nation in the French-language encyclopedias of the eighteenth century inspired Italian encyclopedists to respond. In 1783 the Encyclopédie méthodique de Padoue, a revised edition of Panckoucke’s Encyclopédie méthodique (1782–1832), was published by a group of Italian encyclopedists in Padua. They corrected the articles about Italian culture, politics, and trade for a European audience, which is why the publishing house, the Seminario di Padova, published in French, aiming to become the purveyors of French-language content for nobles, educated merchants, and the bourgeoisie throughout Europe. However, the lower socio-economic classes needed encyclopedic compilations written in Italian. This chapter studies one such endeavor, the Dizionario di geografia moderna composto per l’Enciclopedica metodica (1797). The Dizionario was presented as an Italian translation of the geographic volumes of the French Encyclopédie méthodique. However, upon examination, they differ not only in format, but in content as well. Donato examines the criteria for translating and adapting the geographical content for a more popular Italian audience, analyzing the Dizionario’s legacy in the evolution of encyclopedic print culture in Italy and Europe. The stranded status of the Dizionario, as well as other Italian-language compilations produced in eighteenth-century Italy, is also discussed.

In the last years of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century an extraordinary boom of lexicographical works dealing with medicine took place in Europe, particularly in France, and to a lesser extent in Germany and the UK. This lexicographical fever spread to other European countries such as Spain, where, together with the local publications, translations of medical dictionaries, mostly from French (and to a lesser extent from German) were to be found. However, not all the planned works, whether originally written or translated, found their way to becoming printed material. Causes were varied: together with the (most obvious) economic one, many others were to blame, among them cultural, social, or religious factors. In this chapter, Bertha Gutiérrez-Rodilla and Carmen Quijada-Diez focus on those causes, taking four different cases as examples: Francisco Suárez de Ribera’s Diccionario médico and Joaquín de Villalba’s Diccionario de Higiene y Economía rural veterinaria, both compiled by Spaniards in the eighteenth century; and two other encyclopedic medical dictionaries translated into Spanish in the nineteenth century—one from French and the other from German. For various reasons, all four of these works were somehow stranded in their editorial processes.

In the 1930s, a new authoritarian regime and the literary and artistic vanguard—the Modernist movement—converged on the idea that a Brazilian encyclopedia would represent an emblem of, and a milestone in the development of a new sense of national identity, designated as brasilidade (Brazilianness). Although representatives of both right- and left-wing Modernism sought to make a large-scale national encyclopedia with Brazilian content, none of these attempts succeeded. In addition to social, political, and economic factors, theoretical-methodological reasons account for this unfavorable outcome. In this chapter, Ana Maria Alfonso-Goldfarb, Márcia H. M. Ferraz, Elaine Pereira de Souza, and Silvia Waisse briefly describe the general historical context and then discuss why an encyclopedia came to be seen as a symbol of brasilidade. The focus is on the iconoclastic approach to organizing knowledge by the epitome of Modernism, Mário de Andrade, which by its very nature brought the seeds of its own dismissal. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the role of encyclopedias as tools to organize the knowledge available in different times and places.