The Maurists' Unfinished Encyclopedia (Paperback)

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 Encyclopedie. 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 Encyclopedie 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 Bibliotheque 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 Encyclopedie and the Jesuits' Dictionnaire de Trevoux, 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.

General

Imprint:	Voltaire Foundation
Country of origin:	United Kingdom
Series:	Oxford University Studies in the Enlightenment, 2017:02
Release date:	February 2017
First published:	2017
Authors:	Linn Holmberg
Dimensions:	234 x 156 x 20mm (L x W x T)
Format:	Paperback
Pages:	342
ISBN-13:	978-0-7294-1191-2
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries Promotions
LSN:	0-7294-1191-5
Barcode:	9780729411912

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