The Maurists' unfinished encyclopedia

• In this ground-breaking 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. 

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Filosofi, etik och religion -- Idé- och lärdomshistoria (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- Philosophy, Ethics and Religion -- History of Ideas (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Encyclopedism

French Enlightenment

Benedictines

Dom Antoine-Joseph Pernety

Paris

Saint Maur

Maurists

Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert

microhistory

history of knowledge

history of science

history of the book

history of monasticism

idéhistoria

History of Ideas

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

bok (ämneskategori)