Robert M. Maniquis's

The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution

Almost immediately after the first volumes of Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopédie appeared in 1751, a host of encyclopedic adaptations, imitations, and translations began to appear throughout western Europe. In the past one hundred years historians have closely examined the Encyclopédie and its influence. But there is still much to be learned about the many encyclopedias that appeared in its wake and that reacted, in one way or another, to Diderot's and d'Alembert's example. These encyclopedias enjoyed considerable fame. While the event of their publication was less dramatic than that of the Encyclopédie, they nevertheless had extensive intellectual and political significance. French, Swiss, German, Italian, Spanish, and British encyclopedias reveal, in ideological sweep and in small textual detail, how Enlightenment ideals were modified or countered amidst profound political, social, and technological change.

Using the Swiss Encyclopédie d'Yverdon and its editor Fortunato Bartolomeo De Felice as a point of departure, Clorinda Donato and Robert M. Maniquis have gathered together essays on some of the most representative encyclopedias of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The editors, along with Frank Kafker, Raymond Birn, François de Capitani, Henri Cornaz, Gianmarco Gaspari, Willi Goetschel, Catriona MacLeod, Emery Snyder, Ute van Runset, and Arturo Andrés Roig, offer a variety of perspectives on the history of European encyclopedias, the national concerns that shaped their development, the encyclopedic use of text and illustrations to convey both a sense of plenitude and technological detail, and the decline of the Enlightenment notion of unified epistemological discourse.

Also included is a detailed catalogue for the exhibition The "Encyclopédie" and the Age of Revolution, which appeared at the Research Library of the University of California in Los Angeles, the Lilly Library at Indiana University, and the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University during the 1989 celebration of the bicentennial of the French Revolution. The catalogue, with almost two hundred entries and illustrations of the texts, images, and objects included in the exhibitions, complements the essays and provides a convenient reference tool.

This volume will be useful both to the specialist and to the student who seeks a better understanding of the role of encyclopedism in the social organization of knowledge during a volatile period of modern history.

CLORINDA DONATO teaches in the Department of French and Italian at California State University, Long Beach. She is the author of a forthcoming volume, The "Encyclopédie d'Yverdon": A Comparative Study with Diderot's "Encyclopédie" (Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century) and of several essays on eighteenth-century encyclopedism.

ROBERT M. MANIQUIS teaches in the English Department and the Comparative Literature Program at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Lonely Empires: The Personal and Public Visions of Thomas De Quincey (University of Wisconsin) and the editor of several collections of essays on political and cultural history.

Front Illustration: Léonard Defrance, A l'Egide de Minerve, c. 1781-1782.

Courtesy of the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Dijon.