encyclopaedia

Reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge comprehensively.

It is self-contained and explains subjects in greater detail than a dictionary. It differs from an almanac in that its information is not dated and not from pedagogical texts in its attempt to be easy to consult and to be readily understood by the layperson. Though generally written in the form of many separate articles, encyclopaedias vary greatly in format and content. The prototype of modern encyclopaedias is usually acknowledged to be Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728), and the first modern encyclopaedia was the French Encyclopédie (1751–65). The largest general encyclopaedia in English is the Encyclopædia Britannica.

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▪ reference work

Introduction

also spelled  encyclopedia 

      reference work that contains information on all branches of knowledge or that treats a particular branch of knowledge in a comprehensive manner.

      For more than 2,000 years encyclopaedias have existed as summaries of extant scholarship in forms comprehensible to their readers. The word encyclopaedia is derived from the Greek enkyklios paideia, “general education,” and it at first meant a circle or a complete system of learning—that is, an all-around education. When François Rabelais (Rabelais, François) used the term in French for the first time, in Pantagruel (chapter 20), he was still talking of education. It was Paul Scalich, a German writer and compiler, who was the first to use the word to describe a book in the title of his Encyclopaedia; seu, Orbis disciplinarum, tam sacrarum quam prophanum epistemon… (“Encyclopaedia; or, Knowledge of the World of Disciplines, Not Only Sacred but Profane…”), issued at Basel in 1559. The many encyclopaedias that had been published (publishing, history of) before this time either had been given fanciful titles (Hortus deliciarum, “Garden of Delights”) or had been simply called “dictionary.” The word dictionary has been widely used as a name for encyclopaedias, and Scalich's pioneer use of encyclopaedia did not find general acceptance until Denis Diderot (Diderot, Denis) made it fashionable with his historic French encyclopaedia, the Encyclopédie, although cyclopaedia was then becoming fairly popular as an alternative term. Even today a modern encyclopaedia may still be called a dictionary, but no good dictionary has ever been called an encyclopaedia.

      The meaning of the word encyclopaedia has changed considerably during its long history. Today most people think of an encyclopaedia as a multivolume compendium of all available knowledge, complete with maps and a detailed index, as well as numerous adjuncts such as bibliographies, illustrations, lists of abbreviations and foreign expressions, gazetteers, and so on. They expect it to include biographies of the significant men and women of the present as well as those of the past, and they take it for granted that the alphabetically arranged contents will have been written in their own language by many people and will have been edited by a highly skilled and scholarly staff; nevertheless, not one of these ingredients has remained the same throughout the ages. Encyclopaedias have come in all sizes, from a single 200-page volume written by one man to giant sets of 100 volumes or more. The degree of coverage of knowledge has varied according to the time and country of publication. Illustrations, atlases, and bibliographies have been omitted from many encyclopaedias, and for a long time it was not thought fitting to include biographies of living persons. Indexes are a late addition, and most of the early ones were useless. Alphabetical arrangement was as strongly opposed as the use of any language but Latin, at least in the first 1,000 years of publication in the West, and skilled group editorship has a history of some 200 years.

      In this article the word encyclopaedia has been taken to include not only the great general encyclopaedias of the past and the present but all types of works that claim to provide in an orderly arrangement the essence of “all that is known” on a subject or a group of subjects. This includes dictionaries of philosophy and of American history as well as volumes such as The World Almanac and Book of Facts, which is really a kind of encyclopaedia of current information.

      An outline of the scope and history of encyclopaedias is essentially a guide to the development of scholarship, for encyclopaedias stand out as landmarks throughout the centuries, recording much of what was known at the time of publication. Many homes have no printed encyclopaedia, and very few have more than one, yet in the past two millennia several thousand encyclopaedias have been issued in various parts of the world, and some of these have had many editions. No library has copies of them all; if it were possible to collect them, they would occupy many miles of shelf space. But they are worth preserving—even those that appear to be hopelessly out-of-date—for they contain many contributions by a large number of the world's leaders and scholars.

The nature of encyclopaedias

Historical significance

      In the Speculum majus (“The Greater Mirror”; completed 1244), one of the most important of all encyclopaedias, the French medieval scholar Vincent Of Beauvais maintained not only that his work should be perused but that the ideas it recorded should be taken to heart and imitated. Alluding to a secondary sense of the word speculum (“mirror”), he implied that his book showed the world what it is and what it should become. This theme, that encyclopaedias can contribute significantly to the improvement of humankind, recurs constantly throughout their long history. A Catalan ecclesiastic and Scholastic philosopher, Ramon Llull (Llull, Ramon), regarded the 13th-century encyclopaedias, together with language and grammar, as instruments for the pursuit of truth. Domenico Bandini, an Italian humanist, planned his Fons memorabilium universi (“The Source of Noteworthy Facts of the Universe”) at the beginning of the 15th century to provide accurate information on any subject to educated men who lacked books and to give edifying lessons to guide them in their lives. Francis Bacon (Bacon, Francis, Viscount Saint Alban (or Albans), Baron of Verulam) believed that the intellect of the 17th-century individual could be refined by contact with the intellect of the ideal man. Another Englishman, the poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Coleridge, Samuel Taylor), was well aware of this point of view and said in his Preliminary Treatise on Method (1817) that in the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, which he was proposing to create,

our great objects are to exhibit the Arts and Sciences in their Philosophical harmony; to teach Philosophy in union with Morals; and to sustain Morality by Revealed Religion.

      He added that he intended to convey methodically “the pure and unsophisticated knowledge of the past…to aid the progress of the future.” The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge declared in The Penny Cyclopædia (1833–43) that, although most encyclopaedias attempted to form systems of knowledge, their own would in addition endeavour to

give such general views of all great branches of knowledge, as may help to the formation of just ideas on their extent and relative importance, and to point out the best sources of complete information.

      In De disciplinis (1531; “On the Disciplines”) the Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (Vives, Juan Luis) emphasized the encyclopaedia's role in the pursuit of truth. In Germany of the early 19th century the encyclopaedia was expected to provide the right or necessary knowledge for good society. Probably the boldest claim was that of Alexander Aitchison, who said that his new Encyclopædia Perthensis (1796–1806) was intended to supersede the use of all other English books of reference.

Greek and Roman concepts

      All these ideas were a far cry from the Greek concept, deriving from Plato, that in order to think better it is necessary to know all, and from the Roman attitude of the advisability of acquiring all useful knowledge in order to carry out one's tasks in life competently. The present concept of the encyclopaedia as an essential starting point from which one can embark on a voyage of discovery, or as a point of basic reference on which one can always rely, dates only to the 18th century.

      The prose form has usually been accepted as the only suitable vehicle for the presentation of the text of an encyclopaedia, though L'Image du monde (1245?; “The Image of the World”)—attributed by some to Gautier de Metz, a French poet and priest, and by others to a Flemish theologian, Gossuin—was written in French octosyllabic verse. It has also been generally accepted that an encyclopaedia should adopt a straightforward, factual approach. Even so, the Spanish writer Alfonso de la Torre, in his Visiõ delectable (c. 1484; “Delightful Vision”), adopted the allegorical approach of a child receiving instruction from a series of maidens named Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, and so on.

      The alphabetically arranged encyclopaedia has a history of less than 1,000 years. Most of the encyclopaedias issued before the introduction of printing into Europe had been arranged in a methodical or classified form—that is, ordered systematically by subject. The early compilers of encyclopaedias held, as Coleridge did, that “to call a huge unconnected miscellany of the omne scibile, in an arrangement determined by the accident of initial letters, an encyclopaedia, is the impudent ignorance of your Presbyterian bookmakers!” Today several encyclopaedias still retain the classified form of arrangement.

 There has never been any general agreement on the way in which the contents of an encyclopaedia should be arranged. In Roman times the approach was usually practical, with everyday topics such as astronomy and geography coming first, while the fine arts were relegated to the end of the work. The Roman statesman and writer Cassiodorus, however, in his 6th-century Institutiones, began with the Scriptures and the church and gave only brief attention to such subjects as arithmetic and geometry. St. Isidore of Sevilla (Isidore of Sevilla, Saint), educated in the Classical tradition, redressed the balance in the next century in his Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX (“Twenty Books on Origins [or Etymologies]”), commonly called Etymologiae, giving pride of place to the liberal arts and medicine, the Bible and the church coming later but still preceding such subjects as agriculture and warfare, shipping and furniture. The earliest recorded Arabic encyclopaedia, compiled by the 9th-century Arab philologist and historian Ibn Qutaybah, had a completely different approach, beginning with power, war, and nobility and ending with food and women. A later Persian encyclopaedia, compiled in 975–997 by the Persian scholar and statesman al-Khwārizmī (Khwārizmī, al-), started with jurisprudence and scholastic philosophy, the more practical matters of medicine, geometry, and mechanics being relegated to a second group labelled “foreign knowledge.” The general trend in classification in the Middle Ages is exemplified by Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum majus, which was arranged in three sections: “Naturale”—God, the creation, humankind; “Doctrinale”—language, ethics, crafts, medicine; “Historiale”—world history. The encyclopaedists were, however, still uncertain of the logical sequence of subjects; although there were many who started with theological matters, there were just as many who preferred to put practical topics first.

Content arrangement

      A turning point came with Francis Bacon's (Bacon, Francis, Viscount Saint Alban (or Albans), Baron of Verulam) plan for his uncompleted Instauratio magna (1620; “Great Instauration”), in which he eschewed the endless controversies in favour of a three-section structure, including “External Nature” (covering such topics as astronomy, meteorology, geography, and species of minerals, vegetables, and animals), “Man” (covering anatomy, physiology, structure and powers, and actions), and “Man's Action on Nature” (including medicine, chemistry, the visual arts, the senses, the emotions, the intellectual faculties, architecture, transport, printing, agriculture, navigation, arithmetic, and numerous other subjects).

 In his plan Bacon had achieved more than a thoroughly scientific and acceptable arrangement of the contents of an encyclopaedia; he had ensured that the encyclopaedists would have a comprehensive outline of the scope of human knowledge that would operate as a checklist to prevent the omission of whole fields of human thought and endeavour. Bacon so profoundly altered the editorial policy of encyclopaedists that even 130 years later Diderot gratefully acknowledged his debt in the prospectus (1750) of the Encyclopédie. Because every later encyclopaedia was influenced by Diderot's work, the guidance of Bacon still plays its part today.

      Coleridge (Coleridge, Samuel Taylor), who was very much impressed by Bacon's scheme, in 1817 drew up a rather different table of arrangement for the Encyclopædia Metropolitana. It comprised five main classes: Pure Sciences—Formal (philology, logic, mathematics) and Real (metaphysics, morals, theology); Mixed and Applied Sciences—Mixed (mechanics, hydrostatics, pneumatics, optics, astronomy) and Applied (experimental philosophy, the fine arts, the useful arts, natural history, application of natural history); Biographical and Historical, chronologically arranged; and Miscellaneous and Lexicographical, which included a gazetteer and a philosophical and etymological lexicon. The fifth class was to be an analytical index.

      Although Coleridge's classification was altered by the publisher, and although the Metropolitana was an impressive failure, the ideas for it had a lasting influence. Even though nearly all encyclopaedias today are arranged alphabetically, the classifications of Bacon and Coleridge still enable editors to plan their work with regard to an assumed hierarchy of the various branches of human knowledge.

      The concept of alphabetical (alphabet) order was well known to both the Greeks and Romans, but the latter made little use of it. Neither the Greeks nor the Romans employed it for encyclopaedia arrangement, with the exception of Sextus Pompeius Festus (Festus, Sextus Pompeius) in his 2nd-century De verborum significatu (“On the Meaning of Words”). St. Isidore's encyclopaedia was classified, but it included an alphabetically arranged etymological dictionary. The 10th- or 11th-century encyclopaedic dictionary known as Suidas was the first such work to be completely arranged alphabetically, but it had no influence on succeeding encyclopaedias, although glossaries, when included, were so arranged. Bandini's Fons memorabilium universi (“The Source of Noteworthy Facts of the Universe”), though classified, used separate alphabetical orders for more than a quarter of its sections, and the Italian Domenico Nani Mirabelli's Polyanthea nova (1503; “The New Polyanthea”) was arranged in one alphabetical sequence. These were rare exceptions, however; the real breakthrough came only with the considerable number of encyclopaedic Latin-language dictionaries that appeared in the early 16th century, the best known of which is a series of publications by the French printer Charles Estienne (see Robert I Estienne (Estienne, Robert I)). The last of the great Latin-language encyclopaedias arranged in alphabetical order was Encyclopædia (1630) by the German Protestant theologian and philosopher Johann Heinrich Alsted. The publication of Le Grand Dictionnaire historique (1674; “The Great Historical Dictionary”) of Louis Moréri, a French Roman Catholic priest and scholar, confirmed public preference both for the vernacular and the alphabetically arranged encyclopaedia; this choice was emphasized by the success of the posthumous Dictionnaire universel (1690) by the French lexicographer Antoine Furetière (Furetière, Antoine).

      From time to time important attempts have been made to reestablish the idea of the superiority of the classified encyclopaedia. Coleridge saw the encyclopaedia as a vehicle for enabling individuals to think methodically. He felt that his philosophical arrangement would “present the circle of knowledge in its harmony” and give a “unity of design and of elucidation.” He did agree that his appended gazetteer and English dictionary would best be arranged alphabetically for ease of reference. By then, however, alphabetical arrangement had too strong a hold, and it was not until 1935 that a new major classified encyclopaedia began to appear—the Encyclopédie française (“French Encyclopaedia”), founded by Anatole de Monzie. The Dutch Eerste nederlandse systematisch ingerichte encyclopædie (1946–52; “First Dutch Systematic and Comprehensive Encyclopaedia”) had a classification that was in almost reverse order of that of the Encyclopédie française; both works were established on a philosophical concept of the order and main divisions of knowledge influenced by both Bacon and Coleridge. The Spanish Enciclopedia labor (1955–60) and the Oxford Junior Encyclopædia (1948–56) followed systems of arrangement that were closer to the French than to the Dutch example.

      From earliest times it had been held that the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and the quadrivium (geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, music) were essential ingredients in any encyclopaedia. Even as late as 1435 Alfonso de la Torre began his Visiõ delectable in almost that exact order, and only when he had laid these foundations did he proceed to the problems of science, philosophy, theology, law, and politics. Thus, the seven liberal arts were regarded by the early encyclopaedists as the very mathematics of human knowledge, without a knowledge of which it would be foolish to proceed. This idea survived to a certain extent in Coleridge's classification; he stated that grammar and logic provide the rules of speech and reasoning, while mathematics presents truths that are applicable to external existence.

      When Louis Shores became editor in chief of Collier's Encyclopedia in 1962, he said that he considered the encyclopaedia to be “one of the few generalizing influences in a world of overspecialization. It serves to recall that knowledge has unity.” This echoes the view of the English novelist H.G. Wells (Wells, H.G.), that the encyclopaedia should not be “a miscellany, but a concentration, a clarification, and a synthesis.” The Austrian sociologist Otto Neurath (Neurath, Otto) in the same year suggested that a proposed new international encyclopaedia of unified science should be constructed like an onion, the different layers enclosing the “heart”—comprising in this case the foundations of the unity of science. Even a brief survey of encyclopaedia publishing during the second half of the 20th century is enough to make clear that, as the trivium and quadrivium and the topically classified encyclopaedias that they influenced receded further and further into history, there arose a number of modern encyclopaedists concerned with the importance of making a restatement of the unity of knowledge and of the consequent interdependence of its parts. Though most encyclopaedists were willing to accept the essential reference-book function of encyclopaedias and the role of an alphabetical organization in carrying out that function, they became increasingly disturbed about the emphasis on the fragmentation of knowledge that such a function and such an organization encouraged. A number looked for ways of enhancing the educational function of encyclopaedias by reclaiming for them some of the values of the classified or topical organizations of earlier history.

      Notable among the results of such activities was the 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1974), which was designed in large part to enhance the role of an encyclopaedia in education and understanding without detracting from its role as a reference book. Its three parts (Propædia, or Outline of Knowledge; Micropædia, or Ready Reference and Index; and Macropædia, or Knowledge in Depth) represented an effort to design an entire set on the understanding that there is a circle of learning and that an encyclopaedia's short informational articles on the details of matter within that circle as well as its long articles on general topics must all be planned and prepared in such a way as to reflect their relation to one another and to the whole of knowledge. The Propædia specifically was a reader's version of the circle of learning on which the set had been based and was organized in such a way that a reader might reassemble in meaningful ways material that the accident of alphabetization had dispersed.

Encyclopaedias in general

The role of encyclopaedias

      Of the various types of reference works—who's whos, dictionaries, atlases, gazetteers, directories, and so forth—the encyclopaedia is the only one that can be termed self-contained. Each of the others conveys some information concerning every item it deals with; only the encyclopaedia attempts to provide coverage over the whole range of knowledge, and only the encyclopaedia attempts to offer a comprehensive summary of what is known of each topic considered. To this end it employs many features that can help in its task, including pictures, maps, diagrams, charts, and statistical tables. It also frequently incorporates other types of reference works. Several modern encyclopaedias, from the time of Abraham Rees's New Cyclopædia (1802–20) and the Encyclopédie méthodique (1782–1832; “Systematic Encyclopaedia”) onward, have included a world atlas and a gazetteer, and language dictionaries have been an intermittent feature of encyclopaedias for most of their history.

      Most modern encyclopaedias since the Universal-Lexicon (1732–50) of the Leipzig bookseller Johann Heinrich Zedler have included biographical (biography) material concerning living persons, though the first edition of Encyclopædia Britannica (1768–71) had no biographical material at all. In their treatment of this kind of information, however, they differ from the form of reference work that limits itself to the provision of salient facts without comment. Similarly, with dictionary material, some encyclopaedias provided foreign-language equivalents as well.

      An English lexicographer, H.W. Fowler (Fowler, H W), wrote in the preface to the first edition (1911) of The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English that a dictionary is concerned with the uses of words and phrases and with giving information about the things for which they stand only so far as current use of the words depends upon knowledge of those things. The emphasis in an encyclopaedia is much more on the nature of the things for which the words and phrases stand. Thus, the encyclopaedic dictionary, whose history extends as far back as the 10th- or 11th-century Suidas, forms a convenient bridge between the dictionary and the encyclopaedia, in that it combines the essential features of both, embellishing them where necessary with pictures or diagrams, at the same time that it reduces most entries to a few lines that can provide a brief but accurate introduction to the subject.

Interrelations

      An encyclopaedia does not come into being by itself. Each new work builds on the experience and contents of its predecessors. In many cases the debt is acknowledged: the German publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus (Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold) bought the bankrupt encyclopaedia of Gotthelf Renatus Löbel in 1808 and converted it into his famous Konversationslexikon (see Brockhaus Enzyklopädie), though Jesuits adapted Antoine Furetière's Dictionnaire universel without acknowledgment in their Dictionnaire de Trévoux (1704). Classical writers made many references to their predecessors' efforts and often incorporated whole passages from other encyclopaedias. Of all the many examples, the Cyclopaedia (Cyclopædia) (1728) of the English encyclopaedist Ephraim Chambers (Chambers, Ephraim) has been outstanding in its influence, for Diderot's and Rees's encyclopaedias would have been very different if Chambers had not demonstrated what a modern encyclopaedia could be. In turn, the publication of Encyclopædia Britannica was stimulated by the issue of the French Encyclopédie. Almost every subsequent move in encyclopaedia making is thus directly traceable to Chambers's pioneer work.

Readership

      Encyclopaedia makers have usually envisaged the particular public they addressed. Cassiodorus wrote for the “instruction of simple and unpolished brothers”; the Roman statesman Cato (Cato, Marcus Porcius) wrote for the guidance of his son; Gregor Reisch, prior of the Carthusian monastery of Freiburg, addressed himself to “Ingenuous Youth”; the Franciscan encyclopaedist Bartholomaeus Anglicus wrote for “ordinary” people; the German professor Johann Christoph Wagenseil wrote for children; and Herrad of Landsberg, abbess of Hohenburg, wrote for her nuns. Encyclopædia Britannica was designed for the use of the curious and intelligent layman. The editor of The Columbia Encyclopedia in 1935 tried to provide a work that was compact enough and written simply enough to serve as a guide to the “young Abraham Lincoln.” The Jesuit Michael Pexenfelder made his intended audience clear enough by writing his Apparatus Eruditionis (1670; “Apparatus of Learning”) in the form of a series of conversations between teacher and pupil. St. Isidore addressed himself not only to the needs of his former pupils in the episcopal school but also to the needs of all the priests and monks for whom he was responsible. At the same time, he hoped to provide the newly converted population of Spain with a national culture that would enable it to hold its own in the Byzantine world.

Contributors

      In sympathy with many of their various ends, many scholars have contributed to encyclopaedias. Not all their contributions are known, because until the mid- to late 20th century it was not the custom to sign articles. It is known, however, that the English encyclopaedist John Harris enlisted the help of such scientists as John Ray (Ray, John) and Sir Isaac Newton (Newton, Sir Isaac) for his Lexicon Technicum (1704) and that Rees's New Cyclopædia (1802–20) included articles on music by the English organist and music historian Charles Burney (Burney, Charles) and on botany by the English botanist Sir J.E. Smith. Illustrious Frenchmen such as Voltaire, Rousseau (Rousseau, Jean-Jacques), Condorcet (Condorcet, Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de), Montesquieu (Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de La Brède et de), and Georges Boulanger (Boulanger, Georges) contributed to the Encyclopédie; Thomas Macaulay (Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron), T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence, T E), and more than 100 recipients of Nobel Prizes—including Albert Einstein (Einstein, Albert) and Marie Curie (Curie, Marie)—to the Britannica; the Scottish physicist Sir David Brewster (Brewster, Sir David) and the Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted (Ørsted, Hans Christian) to The Edinburgh Encyclopaedia (1808–30); the English astronomer Sir William Herschel (Herschel, Sir William) and the English mathematician and mechanical genius Charles Babbage (Babbage, Charles) to the Metropolitana; the Russian Communist leader Lenin (Lenin, Vladimir Ilich) to the Granat encyclopaedia; and the dictator Benito Mussolini (Mussolini, Benito) to the Enciclopedia italiana (Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti).

Language

      The language of Western encyclopaedias was almost exclusively Latin (Latin language) up to the time of the first printed works. As with most scholarly writings, the use of Latin was advantageous because it made works available internationally on a wide scale and thus promoted unlimited sharing of information. On the other hand, it made the contents of encyclopaedias inaccessible to the great majority of people. Consequently, there was from the early days on a movement to translate the more important encyclopaedias into various vernaculars. Honorius Inclusus's Imago mundi (c. 1122; “Image of the World”) was rendered into French, Italian, and Spanish; Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum (1220–40; “On the Characteristics of Things”) into English; the Dominican friar Thomas de Cantimpré's De natura rerum (c. 1228–44; “On the Nature of Things”) into Flemish and German; and Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum majus (“The Greater Mirror”) into French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and Catalan. In later years the more successful encyclopaedias were translated from one vernacular into another. Moréri's encyclopaedia, Le Grand Dictionnaire historique, was translated into both English and German. The German Brockhaus appeared in a Russian translation (1890–1907), and the French Petit Larousse had several foreign-language editions. Nevertheless, an encyclopaedia, however successful in its own country, may find acceptance in another country far from easy.

The contemporary world

      Encyclopaedias have often reflected fairly accurately the civilization in which they appeared; that this was deliberate is shown by the frequency with which the earlier compilers included such words as speculum (“mirror”), imago (“image”), and so forth in their titles. Thus, as early as the 2nd century the Greek scholar Julius Pollux (Pollux, Julius) was already defining current technical terms in his Onomastikon. In the 13th century Vincent of Beauvais quoted the ideas of both pagan and Christian philosophers freely and without differentiation, for their statements often agreed on questions of morals. In doing so, he reflected the rapidly widening horizons of a period that saw the founding of so many universities. Bartholomaeus Anglicus devoted a considerable part of his work to psychology and medicine. Theophilus (thought to be Roger of Helmarshausen, a Benedictine monk) as early as the 12th century gave a clear and practical account in his De diversis artibus (“On Diverse Arts”) of contemporary processes used in painting, glassmaking and decoration, metalworking, bone carving, and the working of precious stones, even listing the necessary tools and conditions for successful operations. Pierre Bayle (Bayle, Pierre), a French philosopher and critic, showed in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697; “Historical and Critical Dictionary”) how the scientific renaissance of the previous 40 years had revolutionized contemporary thought. To every detail he applied a mercilessly scientific and inquiring mind that challenged the assumptions and blind reverence for authority that had characterized most of his predecessors.

      At that point in history, much attention was being paid to practical matters: the statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert (Colbert, Jean-Baptiste, Marquis De Seignelay) himself directed the French Académie des Sciences (1675) to produce a work that eventually appeared as the Description et perfection des arts et métiers (1761; “Description and Perfection of the Arts and Crafts”). The German Meyer's Grosses Konversations-Lexicon from the first edition (1840–55) onward paid particular attention to scientific and technical developments, and the Encyclopedia Americana (Encyclopedia Americana, The), aided by the Scientific American, strengthened its coverage in this area from 1911 onward. In its very first edition the Encyclopædia Britannica included lengthy articles containing detailed instructions on such topics as surgery, bookkeeping, and many aspects of farming. Similarly, The New Cyclopaedia, in the early 19th century, incorporated articles on subjects such as candle making and coach building.

      The outstanding example of a completely contemporary encyclopaedia was, of course, the Encyclopédie, in which Diderot (Diderot, Denis), the mathematician and philosopher Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (Alembert, Jean Le Rond d'), and their friends set out to reject much of the heritage of the past in favour of the scientific discoveries and the more advanced thought of their own age. Their decision in this respect was both intellectually and commercially successful. Since that time every edition of any good encyclopaedia has the additional merit of being a valuable source for the thought and attitudes of the people for whom it was published.

Encyclopaedias and politics

      All great encyclopaedia makers have tried to be truthful and to present a balanced picture of civilization as they knew it, although it is probable that no encyclopaedia is totally unbiased. A great encyclopaedia is inevitably a sign of national maturity and, as such, it will often pay tribute to the ideals of its country and its times. The first Hungarian (Hungary) encyclopaedia, János Apáczai Csere's Magyar encyclopaedia (1653–55), was mostly a summary of what was available in foreign works, but the Révai nagy lexikona (1911–35; “Révai's Great Lexicon”) was a handsome tribute to Hungary's emergence as a country in its own right, just as the Enciklopedija Jugoslavije (first published 1955–71) did full justice to the advances made by Yugoslavia in the mid-20th century. The supreme example of an encyclopaedia that set out to present the best possible image of its people and the wealth and stature of their culture is undoubtedly the Enciclopedia italiana (Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti) (1929–36). Mussolini's contribution of an article on fascism indicates the extent to which the work (Italian literature) might be regarded as an ideological tool, but, in fact, most of its contents are international and objective in approach. The various encyclopaedias of the Soviet Union (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) occupy many feet of shelf space, with the later editions each devoting one complete volume to the Soviet Union in all its aspects. Though successive editions of the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya (“Great Soviet Encyclopaedia”) were notable for the obvious political factors that were responsible for the inclusion and exclusion of entries for famous nationals according to the state of their acceptance or condemnation by the existing regime, many critics felt that the third edition (1970–78) was somewhat less ideological than any of the others in this regard.

      Diderot, the editor, and André-François Le Breton, the publisher, faced such opposition from both church and state in their publication of the Encyclopédie (1751–65) that many of the volumes were secretly printed, and the last 10 were issued with a false imprint. In the early part of the 19th century, Brockhaus was condemned by the Austrian censor, and in 1950 its 11th edition was branded as reactionary by the East German government. Nor was political censorship the only form of oppression in the world of encyclopaedias. Antoine Furetière, on issuing his prospectus (1675) for his Dictionnaire universel, found his privilege to publish cancelled by the French government at the request of the Académie Française (French Academy), which accused him of plagiarizing its own dictionary. The Leipzig book trade, fearing that publication of Johann Heinrich Zedler's huge Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexikon (Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon) (1732–50; “Great Complete Universal Lexicon”) might put them out of business, made such difficulties that Zedler thought it best to issue his work in Halle.

The reader's needs

      People look to encyclopaedias to give them an adequate introduction to a topic that interests them. Many expect an encyclopaedia to omit nothing and to include consideration of all controversial aspects of a subject. Encyclopaedia makers of the past assumed that there was a large public willing to read through an entire encyclopaedia if it was not too large. In the 18th century, for example, there was a good market for pocket-size compendia for the traveler, or for the courtier to browse in as he waited for an audience. Thus, although most encyclopaedias are multivolume works, there are many small works ranging from the Didascalion (c. 1128; “Teaching”) of the Scholastic philosopher and mystic theologian Hugh of Saint-Victor, through Gregor Reisch's Margarita philosophica (1496; “The Philosophical Pearl”) and the French writer Pons-Augustin Alletz's Petite Encyclopédie (1766), to C.T. Watkins's Portable Cyclopædia (1817). The last was issued by a remarkable publisher, Sir Richard Phillips, who realized the great demand for pocket-size compendia and drove a thriving trade in issuing a number of these; he is thought to have written large sections of these himself.

Royalty and encyclopaedias

      Most of the classic Chinese encyclopaedias owe their existence to the patronage of emperors. In the West the Roman scholar Pliny (Pliny the Elder) dedicated his Historia naturalis (“Natural History”) to the emperor Titus, and Julius Pollux dedicated his Onomastikon to his former pupil, the Roman emperor Commodus. The Byzantine philosopher and politician Michael Psellus (Psellus, Michael) dedicated his De omnifaria doctrina (“On All Sorts of Teaching”) to his former pupil the emperor Michael VII Ducas, ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire. Gervase of Tilbury, an English ecclesiastic, compiled his Otia imperialia (“Imperial Pastimes”) for the Holy Roman emperor Otto IV, and Alfonso de la Torre prepared his Visiõ delectable for Prince Carlos of Viana (Viana, Carlos de Aragon, Prince de). St. Isidore dedicated his encyclopaedia to the Visigothic king Sisebut, and the French king Louis IX patronized Vincent of Beauvais's Speculum majus. Nor did kings eschew the work of compiling encyclopaedias. The emperor Constantine VII (Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus) of the Eastern Roman Empire was responsible for a series of encyclopaedias, and Alfonso X of Spain organized the making of the Grande e general estoria (“Great and General History”).

Contents and authority

      The extent to which readers have been dependent on editorial decisions concerning not only what to include but also what to exclude has yet to be explored in detail. For example, Vincent Of Beauvais rarely mentioned the pagan and Christian legends that were so popular in his day. The anonymous compiler of the scholarly Compendium philosophiae (c. 1316; “Compendium of Philosophy”) was careful to omit the credulous tales that appeared in contemporary bestiaries (bestiary). For many centuries it was not considered right to include biographies of men and women who were still alive. And the early Romans, such as Cato, rejected much of Greek theoretical knowledge, regarding it as a dangerous foreign influence and believing with the Stoics that wisdom consisted in living according to nature's precepts.

      Whatever the compiler did decide to include had a far-reaching influence. Pliny's vast Historia naturalis has survived intact because for so many centuries it symbolized human knowledge, and even the “old wives' tales” it injudiciously included were unquestioningly copied into many later encyclopaedias. The influence of St. Isidore's work can be traced in writings as late as the collection of travelers' tales first published in French in the 1350s and attributed to Sir John Mandeville (Mandeville, Sir John) and to the 14th-century Confessio amantis (“A Lover's Confession”) of the English poet John Gower (Gower, John). Honorius's Imago mundi is known to have influenced some of the German medieval chronicles and the Norse saga of Olaf Tryggvason (Olaf I Tryggvason). The main source of classics such as the Roman de la rose (“Romance of the Rose”), the Alexander romances (Alexander romance), Archbishop Giovanni da Colonna's Liber de viris illustribus (“Book Concerning Illustrious Men”), and the recorded lives of the saints can be traced to the Speculum majus. The direct and indirect influence of the critical encyclopaedias of Bayle and Diderot is, of course, incalculable.

Editing and publishing

The length of encyclopaedias and encyclopaedic articles

      There always have been and there still are a number of successful one-volume encyclopaedias. Outstanding examples of the 20th century include The Columbia Encyclopedia, the Petit Larousse, Hutchinson's New Twentieth Century Encyclopedia, and the Random House Encyclopedia. In the Random House set the contents were divided into two sections, a Colorpedia, composed of relatively lengthy articles dealing with broad topics, and an Alphapedia, composed of concise entries on very specific subjects. Some booksellers and publishers confirm that there is, however unreasonably, a certain amount of public prejudice against the single-volume form and that most people prefer a multivolume work. Throughout the entire history of encyclopaedias there has been much variation in the number of volumes. Many of the Chinese encyclopaedias have been considerably larger than any Western work. Pliny's Historia naturalis comprised about 2,500 chapters, Zedler's Universal-Lexicon was planned for 12 volumes and eventually filled 64; the publishers of the Encyclopédie were faced with a lawsuit (1768–78) for producing a 26-volume encyclopaedia instead of the 10 volumes they had promised; Johann Samuel Ersch and Johann Gottfried Gruber's German Allgemeine Encyclopädie (Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste) (“General Encyclopaedia”) had already reached 167 volumes at the time of its discontinuance; and the major Soviet encyclopaedia consisted of more than 50 volumes. Today most print encyclopaedias range between 20 and 30 volumes, occupying between three and four feet (about a metre) of shelf space. Thus, the modern encyclopaedia appears smaller than its 19th-century counterpart, but, in fact, the content may be greater because the thick mat paper of Victorian times has been replaced by a thinner paper capable of reproducing colour and black-and-white halftone illustrations with sharp definition.

      Even more noticeable than variations in the number of volumes in encyclopaedias has been an even greater variation in the average lengths of articles within those volumes. The 11th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica contained almost twice as many articles as the last significant edition before it, but it contained only 15 or 16 percent more words. The difference had to do with editorial considerations regarding the matter of fragmentation. Although most of the major encyclopaedias of the past had devoted considerable space to any topic of major importance, there was increasing recognition in the 19th century that an alternative method of treatment would be to break large subjects into their constituent subtopics for alphabetical distribution throughout the set. Those who favoured this more fragmented approach argued that by focusing on the smaller part of the whole, the editors could facilitate the user's search for specific information and that the liberal provision of cross-references would facilitate a recombination of the fragments by those interested in the bigger picture. Against this practice, it was argued that most cross-references are not followed up by most readers, that the shorter fragmented pieces work against a correct understanding of the larger subject, and that fragmentation inevitably involved a great amount of repetition of basic information throughout all the related articles. Nevertheless, Brockhaus, Meyer, Larousse, and other encyclopaedias of the shorter-entry type have had and continue to have a strong following.

Authorship

      The first encyclopaedia makers had no doubts concerning their ability to compile their works single-handedly. Cassiodorus, Honorius Inclusus (or Solitarius), and Vincent of Beauvais fully justified this attitude, though their task was largely that of the anthologist. Vincent and many other encyclopaedists employed both scribes and scholars to help them in their work, but, once the encyclopaedia reached the stage of independent writing, it was clear that the editorial task was going to become more complex. Even so, some of the later pocket encyclopaedias—such as the English bookseller John Dunton's mediocre Ladies' Dictionary (1694), An Universal History of Arts and Sciences (1745) by the French-born Englishman Chevalier Denis de Coëtlogon, and the popular Allgemeines Lexicon (1721; “General Lexicon”) by the Prussian scholar Johann Theodor Jablonski—were substantially or almost wholly the work of a single author; such items are, however, negligible.

      John Harris, an English theologian and scientist, may have been one of the first to enlist the aid of experts, such as the naturalist John Ray and Sir Isaac Newton, in compiling his Lexicon Technicum (1704; “Technical Lexicon”). Johann Heinrich Zedler, in his Universal-Lexicon (1732–50), went further by enlisting the help of two general editors, supported by nine specialist editors, the result being a gigantic work of great accuracy. The French Encyclopédie, the largest encyclopaedia issued at that time, inevitably had many contributors, although the French writer Voltaire said that Diderot's collaborator, the Chevalier Louis de Jaucourt (aided by secretaries), contributed about three-quarters of the articles in that work. The pattern for future encyclopaedias was established: for any substantial work, it would be necessary not only to have contributions from the experts of the day, but it would also be essential to have subject editors who could supervise the coverage and content in each area of knowledge.

Encyclopaedia adjuncts

      The readers of modern encyclopaedias are rarely aware of the numerous aids that have been provided to make their search for information so easy and efficient. Only when recourse is had to one of the older encyclopaedias does the reader become conscious of the advances that have been made. In former days it was often difficult to distinguish between one article and the next, because distinctive headings or inset titles or the use of boldface was rare. Nor was the necessity for running titles or alphabetical notations at the head of the pages fully appreciated. Even more troublesome was the problem of the arrangement of entries for several persons of the same name; reference to the older encyclopaedias under such headings as “Henry,” “John,” or “Louis”—names held by both princes and religious potentates—will show how little the art of acceptable arrangement was understood.

Cross-references and bibliographies

      Cross-references are an essential feature of the modern encyclopaedia; they date back at least as far as Bandini's Fons memorabilium universi, but it was Brockhaus who introduced an ingenious system of using arrows instead of the words see also. The Columbia Encyclopedia achieved the same effect by printing in small capital letters the words under which additional information could be found. Some encyclopaedias devote each volume to one letter of the alphabet or indicate the division between letters by thumb-indexing. In electronic encyclopaedias, cross-references are hyperlinked and provide virtually instantaneous movement throughout the database. In established encyclopaedias the bibliographies (bibliography) for individual articles are usually the result of careful editorial consultation with the writer and with librarians.

Indexes

      Undoubtedly the major adjunct of the modern encyclopaedia is its index. As early as 1614 the bishop of Petina, Antonio Zara, included a type of index in his Anatomia ingeniorum et scientiarum (“Anatomy of Talents and Sciences”). A Greek professor at Basel, Johann Jacob Hoffman, added an index to his Lexicon universale of 1677; the Encyclopédie was completed by a two-volume “Table analytique et raisonnée” for the entire 33 volumes of text, supplements, and plates; and the Britannica included individual indexes to the lengthier articles in its 2nd edition (1778–84) and provided its first separate index volume for the 7th edition (1830–42). The nature of good indexing was still far from being fully understood, however, and it was only later in the 19th century that really good encyclopaedia indexes were prepared. In the 20th-century encyclopaedias that provided indexes, the reader was invariably advised to read the guides to their use, because the index had become a sophisticated tool that offered a wealth of information in one alphabetical sequence. Breaking with the alphabetical approach to indexing, the Britannica Electronic Index, made available in 1992, was an inventory of all index terms of the Encyclopædia Britannica; it was to be used topically by the reader. By the 21st century, electronic indexing had grown so sophisticated that it facilitated movement through a database, showed topical relationships, and occasionally offered users the opportunity to form their own groupings of related articles.

Illustrative material

 The use of illustrations in encyclopaedias goes back almost certainly to St. Isidore's time. One of the most beautiful examples of an illustrated encyclopaedia was the abbess Herrad's 12th-century Hortus deliciarum. In many earlier encyclopaedias the illustrations were often more decorative than useful, but from the end of the 17th century the better encyclopaedias began to include engraved (engraving) plates of great accuracy and some of great beauty. The Encyclopédie is particularly distinguished for its superb volume of plates—reprinted in the 20th century. In modern times the trend has been toward more lavish illustration of encyclopaedias, including elaborate coloured anatomical plates with superimposed layers, and specially inset small coloured halftones, as well as marginal line drawings. With the advent of electronic delivery of databases, intricate animations and audio and video clips became common features of online and disc-based encyclopaedias.

The level of writing

      The American editor Franklin H. Hooper (Hooper, Franklin Henry), undaunted by his own lack of scholarship, took a notable part in ensuring that the articles of the 11th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica were kept within the mental range of the average reader. The problem of the encyclopaedist has always been to strike the right mean between too learned and too simplified an approach. The Roman Cassiodorus wrote his encyclopaedia to provide a bridge between his unlettered monks and the scholarly books he had preserved for their use. Hugh of Saint-Victor, the theologian and philosopher, achieved one of the best approaches in his charming Didascalion (c. 1128), in which he used an elegant and simple style that everyone could appreciate. The abbess Herrad, knowing her audience, described in didactic fashion the history of the world (with emphasis on biblical stories) and its content, with commentaries and beautifully coloured miniatures designed to help and edify the nuns in her charge. The master of Dante, Brunetto Latini (Latini, Brunetto), wanted to reach the Italian cultured and mercantile classes with his Li livres dou trésor (c. 1264; “Treasure Books”) and therefore used a concise and accurate style that evoked an immediate and general welcome. Gregor Reisch managed to cover the whole university course of the day in his brief Margarita philosophica, which correctly interpreted the taste of the younger generation at the end of the 15th century.

      Until the 17th century a great many encyclopaedias had been written by clerics for clerics, and further examples continued to be published. After that time, more popular works began to be published as well, particularly in France, where such palatable compilations as the Sieur Saunier's Encyclopédie des beaux esprits (1657; “Encyclopaedia of Great Minds”) had an immediate success. The philosopher Pierre Bayle (Bayle, Pierre) in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) introduced the lay reader to the necessity of reading more critically; in this his work constituted a forerunner of the Encyclopédie, with its challenges to many undiscriminating assumptions about religion and politics, history and government. On the other hand, the contemporary Dictionnaire universel of the Jesuit fathers of Trévoux had a popularity among the orthodox that caused it to run through six editions and then gradually to expand from three to eight volumes between 1704 and 1771.

Supplementary material

      The idea of keeping encyclopaedias up-to-date by means of supplements, yearbooks, and so on, dates back more than two centuries. In 1753 a two-volume supplement to the 7th edition of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia was compiled by George Lewis Scott, a tutor to the English royal family. Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, a publisher, issued a four-volume supplement to the Encyclopédie (1776–77), in spite of Diderot's refusal to edit it. The Britannica included a 200-page appendix in the last volume of the 2nd edition (1784) and issued a two-volume supplement to the 3rd edition (1801; reprinted 1803). Brockhaus broke new ground by issuing in monthly parts (1857–64) a yearbook to the 10th edition (1851–55), which, on the commencement of the issue of the 11th edition, changed its name to Unsere Zeit (“Our Times”) and doubled its frequency (1865–74). In 1907 Larousse began publication of the Larousse mensuel illustré (“Monthly Illustrated Larousse”). The New International Encyclopaedia issued a yearbook from 1908 (retrospective to 1903), and the Britannica issued one yearbook in 1913 and recommenced with the Britannica Book of the Year in 1938. The publication of supplements has a much longer history in China, but the system on which the Chinese operated was very different from that of the West. By the second half of the 20th century, yearbooks had become a common feature of most general encyclopaedias. In the main, they proved more effective in recording the events and discoveries of each year than keeping the main articles up-to-date. They also performed an essential duty in informing their readers of much that was not reported or that was only inadequately reported in the press; at the same time, they provided a more reasoned assessment and perspective than the daily newspapers and the weekly commentaries could usually achieve.

      Some of the leading encyclopaedias offered additional services during the second half of the 20th century that provided the reader with the expert guidance necessary to get the best from a modern encyclopaedia's complex contents. To this end, small subject guides were sometimes issued, which in narrative form outlined the whole field and brought each topic into perspective, drawing attention to the appropriate articles that would throw further light on the matter. A research service was another supplementary feature offered by some established encyclopaedias. Through such services, purchasers were permitted to submit a limited number of questions about topics either not dealt with in the set or dealt with inadequately. These services were provided in a variety of ways. In some cases, frequently asked questions were answered with previously prepared reports listed in the publisher's catalog; in others, questions were referred to a special office staff for answers culled from the publisher's own databases; in still others, they were referred to researchers stationed at selected specialized libraries.

      Other supplementary material sometimes issued by encyclopaedias ranged from 10-year illustrated surveys of events to sets of books considered to have had a major impact on humankind. Although few publishers included dictionaries as an integral part of their encyclopaedia, they frequently supplied a well-known, independently compiled work as part of their service. During the last quarter of the 20th century, it became an increasingly common custom for an encyclopaedia to incorporate an atlas and a gazetteer, often in the last volume.

Problems of encyclopaedias

Authorship

      In using a reputable encyclopaedia, the reader is inclined to accept the authenticity of any article he or she happens to read. Subconsciously the reader is aware that the highly organized staff of scholars credited for the work must inevitably have ensured the scrutiny of all material. Nevertheless, over the course of the 20th century, editors of encyclopaedias tended more and more to commission signed articles by well-known experts. For its 1922 supplement, Britannica commissioned articles from some of the most famous men and women of the day: Belgium by the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (Pirenne, Henri); Anton Ivanovich Denikin by the Russian-born jurist and historian Sir Paul Vinogradoff (Vinogradoff, Sir Paul Gavrilovitch); Drama by St. John Ervine (Ervine, Saint John), the British playwright and novelist; Czechoslovakia by the Czech statesman Tomáš Masaryk (Masaryk, Tomáš (Garrigue)); and Russian Army by Gen. Yuri Danilov. This created a new dimension in encyclopaedias, for it introduced a personal element on a scale previously seen only in the columns of the Encyclopédie. There is in fact a difference in the treatment of a subject written by a politician such as Masaryk and by an academic historian of distinction. Each writer has something important to offer, and the results will be very different.

      Encyclopaedia writing requires teamwork in which each article is edited in relation to others closely connected by subject. If a writer makes a statement that is partly qualified or totally contradicted in another article, the contributions of both writers must be scrutinized by the editorial staff, whose job it is to effect some kind of eventual agreement. Truth can be viewed from many standpoints, and references to any controversy may produce problems demanding all the skill and tact of the editors to resolve, particularly when the reputation of the writer is at stake in a signed article.

Length restrictions

      The restrictions imposed by the space available for any particular article in a print encyclopaedia are of great consequence. Writing such articles is an art of its own; within a limited space so much must be compressed—nothing important can be omitted, nothing trivial should be included.

Revision and updating

      The revision and updating of an encyclopaedia is one of the greatest challenges to its makers, one to which many ingenious, if admittedly partial, solutions have been found. The problem of keeping an encyclopaedia up-to-date has two facets: the first is to assure that any one printing or edition is as up-to-date as possible at the time of its preparation, and the second is to make it possible for purchasers of a print set to maintain the set in an up-to-date condition. One apparent answer to both aspects, the loose-leaf format, has never been a publishing success. Nelson's Perpetual Loose Leaf Encyclopaedia (second edition, 1920) was discontinued; the prestigious Encyclopédie française (1935–66), however, continued to be available in both loose-leaf and bound volumes during the 20th century.

      Louis Moréri set an example in his rapid incorporation of new information in each succeeding issue of his widely used Grand Dictionnaire historique (1674; “The Great Historical Dictionary”). When the German publisher Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus (Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold) first issued his great encyclopaedia, he was forced by an unexpectedly large public demand to issue edition after edition in quick succession (some of them even overlapped). In all of these he took great pride in providing the latest information, personally supervising much of the revision of individual articles. Moreover, he provided special supplements incorporating these revisions for purchasers of each edition.

      In the 18th and 19th centuries, most encyclopaedias that lasted long enough to require revision met the problem by preparing a new edition or by issuing supplements. In the case of Encyclopædia Britannica, the first edition (1768–71) was replaced by an essentially new and enlarged second edition in 1777–84; the ninth edition (1875–89), however, remained in print until the preparation of the 11th edition (1910–11), with a 10th edition nominally created by the addition of 11 supplementary volumes in the interim. Among the most serious shortcomings of the new-edition method was the tendency of publishers to dismiss editorial staff after the preparation of a new edition, a practice which meant that skilled editors were dispersed and had to be replaced once the decision to create a new edition had been taken.

      Early in the 20th century it became the practice to fill the gaps between new editions with annual summaries called yearbooks. A turning point came when, soon after the publication of its 14th edition in 1929, Encyclopædia Britannica announced the introduction of a system of continuous revision that in one form or another became the practice of most major encyclopaedias in many countries. Under continuous revision programs, some percentage of the articles in a print set are updated or improved in other ways on a flexible schedule. Several publishers were able to take advantage of 20th-century printing technologies to reprint their sets on an annual basis and to introduce into each new printing as many revised entries as possible. The system implied the existence of a permanent editorial department able, with the assistance of academic advisers and article authors, to monitor the condition of entries on a constant basis.

      Continuous revision has certain drawbacks. The most serious disadvantage may relate to the rapidity with which articles in a set become noticeably unbalanced in relation to one another. Changes and events requiring revision of articles are more readily apparent in the scientific, technological, biographical, and historical areas, with the result that articles in such fields are revised much more frequently than articles in such fields as the humanities, where important changes do occur, though more subtly.

      An equally important disadvantage in continuous revision has to do with the inherent difficulty of revising, on an article-by-article basis, a set of reference books containing many thousands of articles. First, editors are usually unable to revise all the articles that might be affected by a new development. In the case of the assassination of a president, for instance, the editors of the next printing might add the event to the president's biography and even to the history of the country but be unable to acknowledge the event in all the other articles in which the president's name appears. Second, updating a single article is not always as simple as it might at first appear to be. In a biography, for instance, critical events can occur so often that it soon becomes no longer possible simply to add an additional sentence to the end of the piece: the death of the subject of the biography might be the occasion for a reassessment of the person's significance or for the disclosure of long unknown or unpublicized information; in archaeology, a new discovery may be at serious variance with several previously held theories on which a whole article might well be based. In such instances, revision must go beyond the simple addition of a sentence or the insertion of a word or date and may involve partial or complete rewriting. With the rapid pace of modern research, this can quickly become an ever-present editorial problem of great complexity.

Controversy and bias

      Throughout the years, most major encyclopaedias have been accused of reflecting bias in one or more of their articles. In the Encyclopédie the lack of neutrality was intentional and apparent. Various editions of Encyclopædia Britannica, almost from the beginning, were accused of bias as well. The practice of relying on outside specialists for articles, a practice now followed by most serious encyclopaedias, has increased the likelihood that bias will be worked into an article. Many critics have felt that the reader is protected in such cases by the fact that the identity of the contributor is not hidden. It has also been argued that the presence of slanted opinions in an article gave to older encyclopaedias a colour and sense of conviction that is lacking in most modern works. Modern editors of major encyclopaedias nevertheless make every effort to eliminate any hint of bias in their products, but the task is a difficult one. For example, an account of the Korean War might vary according to whether it was written by a North or South Korean, a Chinese, or an American writer.

      Similarly, the inclusion of a map showing the frontiers between two or more nations may give rise to vigorous controversy if the nations involved dispute any part of the boundaries as shown. The illustration of a painting with an attribution to one artist may draw strong protests from art critics who do not agree with the writer. Controversy today has grown rapidly on many subjects that were not earlier in dispute.

The kinds of encyclopaedias

General encyclopaedias

Influence of printing

      It is now possible to see, in the past 2,000 years of encyclopaedia production, the existence of a pattern closely related to the changing social needs of each age. The outstanding circumstances that governed the policy and production of encyclopaedias for the first 15 centuries were that comparatively few people were able to read and, stemming partly from this and partly from the cost of materials and workmanship, that copies of any lengthy work were very expensive. Only when printing was introduced into Europe did the cost of production drop by any large amount; this development in turn helped to stimulate the growth of readership. A notable feature at the time of the early printing press was the sudden growth in the popularity of some of the older encyclopaedias as a result of the tendency to ensure a ready market by printing works of which many manuscript copies were in circulation.

      During the first 16 centuries of their publication the majority of encyclopaedias comprised great anthologies of the most significant writings on as many subjects as possible. The arrangement of these excerpts was constantly varying according to the individual compiler's concept of the hierarchies of human knowledge; some of these classification systems were more suitable than others, but none was completely successful in meeting the tastes of the reading public, because there was no general agreement on the essential order of ideas. Although the compiler exercised considerable latitude in choosing items to include in the encyclopaedia, comment was often restricted to a minimum, so that the reader was free to form an opinion of what was offered. In addition, because the compiler selected material from what had already been written, the reader was referred to the past, and, although he or she could enjoy the heritage of the preceding cultures, the reader was not being put in touch with as much of the contemporary world as might have been desired.

      About the 10th or 11th century a new type of encyclopaedia began to emerge, probably stimulated by the growing number of language dictionaries that, starting well before printing was used, grew ever more numerous once they could be produced. Many early dictionaries were little more than enlarged glossaries, but from the time of Suidas onward there began to appear a type of dictionary—now called encyclopaedic—that added to the definition and etymology of a word a description of the functions of the thing or idea it named. In some dictionaries, such as those of the Estiennes, a French family of book dealers and printers, this description might in some cases be of considerable length. Thus, the compilers of the new form of encyclopaedia that emerged in the 16th and 17th centuries inevitably thought in terms of arranging their entries in alphabetical order because the dictionaries had already familiarized the reading public with this system.

      The last half of the 18th century, by way of the Enlightenment, brought such an upheaval in the human concept of the world that the time was ripe for further experiments in the form of the encyclopaedia. The French encyclopaedists Diderot and d'Alembert and their band of contributors broke no new ground in the physical format and arrangement of the encyclopaedia, but their work inspired the intelligentsia of other nations to produce really good encyclopaedias of their own. It is no coincidence that both the German Brockhaus (Brockhaus Enzyklopädie) and the Scottish Britannica appeared with policies so different from all that had gone before that no publisher of any new encyclopaedia could afford to ignore their new patterns. Their formulas were so good that the modern encyclopaedia is simply a vastly improved elaboration of their method of arrangement and organization. The compilers of both encyclopaedias had taken the best ideas from the anthologies and miscellanies of the early period of encyclopaedia making and from the later stage of encyclopaedic dictionaries. Realizing that the reading public would not tolerate the omission of some subjects and the unequal treatment of others, they prepared works in which at least a few lines were devoted to almost every conceivable topic, and for more important subjects a full account was provided, written by an expert, if possible.

Three stages of development

      The three periods of the history of encyclopaedias—(1) to 1600, (2) 1601–1799, and (3) 1800 onward—are very unequal. They are, moreover, to a certain extent misleading, for the different forms of the encyclopaedia overlapped at each turning point for some years, and even today there are still some important survivals from the two earlier periods. One can study and compare what each of the three main types of encyclopaedia has had to offer by reading entries on the same subject in the Encyclopédie française, Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), and the 15th edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica. The Encyclopédie française will provide one or more well-written treatises on the subject by writers of note. This is exactly what the encyclopaedias of the earliest period offered; and in both the old and the contemporary encyclopaedia the reader is left free to form an opinion after reading what the experts have to say. Webster's, a one-volume work, of course provides much less, but it also gives much more, because it adds definitions and, often, explanatory drawings or diagrams to a concise text that tells the reader much in a very few lines. This is exactly what the encyclopaedic dictionaries of Louis Moréri, Antoine Furetière, and others were offering in the 17th and 18th centuries. Britannica's contribution is distinct from those of the other two in that it provides a synthesis of what is known on the subject to date and attempts to assess its current position.

      The encyclopaedias of the period before 1600 apparently were designed for a small group of people who had much the same educational background as well as similar interests and opportunities to pursue them. In general, these readers had a common outlook on both religious and secular matters. Moreover, although they were citizens of many different countries, they were united by their knowledge and use of Latin (Latin language), the international language.

      The Eastern Roman emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus tried to plant firmly in the hearts of the most worthy of his contemporaries both knowledge and experience of the past. His were troubled times, and he felt justified in using much of his enforced leisure (he came to the throne at age two in 911 but was not allowed to rule until 945) to provide for the administrators and emissaries of his court the most useful extracts from the writings of a very catholic selection of authors, including the patriarch of Constantinople John of Antioch ( John Scholasticus), the Roman historian Appian (Appian of Alexandria), the Greek historian Polybius, the Greek philosopher Socrates, the 5th-century Byzantine historian Zosimus, and many others. One of the unexpected by-products of this industry was the preservation of a large number of writings, a service that some of the other medieval encyclopaedias also performed.

      An advantage of the encyclopaedists of the first period (i.e., before 1600) was that each of them either knew or could visualize his reading public, a point that encouraged a minimum of commentary and moralizing. In a way, they were performing the duties of a personal librarian in that they drew their readers' attention to innumerable passages that they believed might be useful to them in their work or their private lives. The possibility of achieving even more was fully appreciated: the English scholar Alexander Neckham, in his early 13th-century De naturis rerum (“On the Natures of Things”), hoped that by imparting knowledge he might help to lift or lighten the human spirit, and to this end he tried to maintain a simple and admirably clear text. Neckham's near-contemporary Bartholomaeus Anglicus similarly set himself in his De proprietatibus rerum (“On the Characteristics of Things”) to bring to his readers' attention the nature and properties of the things and ideas on which the early Christian Fathers and the philosophers had expatiated, but he forbore to comment on their writings, leaving his readers to form their own judgments. The anonymous compiler of the Compendium philosophiae (c. 1316; “Compendium of Philosophy”) believed the knowledge of truth to be the supreme and final perfection of humankind; thus, he never moralized on the contents of his encyclopaedia, its cumulative effect thereby being the more impressive.

      Within the early period of the history of encyclopaedias, a number of stages can be distinguished that make each group of works significant in any study of the development of scholarship throughout the West. Encyclopaedias of Classical times reached their culmination in Pliny's (Pliny the Elder) Historia naturalis, which was issued in the time of the Roman emperor Titus (39–81 CE). Not one of the encyclopaedias of Pliny or his predecessors paid much attention to religion; if it was discussed, the approach was antiquarian, the gods of the different nations ruled by Rome being named and described in a dispassionate spirit that reflected both the tolerance and the noninvolvement of the Romans in these matters. The emphasis instead was on government, geography, zoology, medicine, history, and practical matters. The theories of the various philosophers were outlined impartially, no indication being given of any personal preference. This objective approach adopted by the Romans in their encyclopaedias was not achieved again until the 19th century.

      By the time of the Roman philosopher Boethius and the statesman Cassiodorus (c. the 5th and 6th centuries CE), the position concerning objectivity had changed. Like Pliny and the Roman statesman Cato, Cassiodorus had been an administrator, and, while his predecessors had been engaged in interpreting and epitomizing the knowledge of the ancient world for the benefit of their own people, Cassiodorus realized the necessity for providing a new interpretation of this knowledge for the Goths, the new masters of Italy. In the next 700 years the impact of Christianity brought a new phase in Western encyclopaedia making, just as the impact of Islam is clearly visible in the Arabic encyclopaedias of the same period. Although religion is not always given pride of place in the encyclopaedias of those times, it pervades the whole of their contents. Thus, Cassiodorus's division of his encyclopaedia into two main sections—divine and human—is made even more interesting by his inclusion of cosmography, the liberal arts, and medicine in the first section. Although the compilers of the encyclopaedias of this period could envisage in theory a perfectly logical arrangement for their encyclopaedias by starting with the creation and working downward to the smallest and least significant of God's creations, in practice they found this very difficult to apply, and the result was often only superficially scientific. Moreover, the inclusion of such topics as astrology and magic was surprisingly prevalent and only began to disappear after the publication of Liber floridus (c. 1120; “The Flowering Book”), by Lambert, a canon of Saint-Omer, a work that discarded practical matters in favour of metaphysical discussion.

      The third stage in the development of encyclopaedias came with the introduction of vernacular editions, such as the Mappemonde and Li livres dou trésor, and the reflection of the impact of Greek philosophical works (in translation) in the middle of the 13th century. In this era there was an increasing number of lay encyclopaedists—e.g., Latini, Bandini, de la Torre—and the subject coverage changed to give more space and importance to the practical matters that interested the rising mercantile class. At the same time, theology no longer dominated the classification schemes. humanism reached its full expression in the Spanish philosopher Juan Luis Vives (Vives, Juan Luis)'s De disciplinis (1531), in which all the compiler's arguments were grounded on nature and made no appeal to religious authority. Although compositors and printers were not immune from mistakes, the printing press eliminated one of the most vexatious problems: the introduction or perpetuation of textual errors by the manuscript copyists. At the same time, the wider circulation of encyclopaedias through the unrestricted sales of printed copies brought about a situation in which the compilers could no longer envisage their reading public and accordingly adjusted their approach to their largely unknown audience.

Encyclopaedic dictionaries

      The period spanning the 17th and 18th centuries is characterized by the flourishing of the encyclopaedic dictionaries that were pioneered by the Estienne family in France in the 16th century. During these two centuries this form of encyclopaedia reflected two different policies. There was the encyclopaedia, such as those of the Germans Johann Theodor Jablonski and Johann Heinrich Zedler, that paid particular attention to the fields of history and biography. There was also a new form of encyclopaedia—if the exception of the 12th-century De diversis artibus be set aside—that devoted itself to the arts and sciences. The first type can therefore be said to be retrospective in approach, while the arts and sciences encyclopaedia was clearly identifiable with contemporary matters.

      None of these divisions is actually clear-cut, for many traditional encyclopaedias continued to be compiled throughout the period, and not all the historical-biographical encyclopaedias ignored the arts and sciences or contemporary people and events. Nevertheless, the issue of Antoine Furetière's encyclopaedia and the immediate follow-up by Le Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences (1694) by the writer Thomas Corneille (Corneille, Thomas) (the younger brother of the playwright Pierre Corneille (Corneille, Pierre)) were sufficient to indicate the growing public interest in a more modern form of encyclopaedia. This indication was confirmed by the successful publication of John Harris's Lexicon Technicum (1704), which the author described as “an universal English dictionary of arts and sciences: explaining not only the terms of art, but the arts themselves.” It is significant that Harris omitted such subjects as theology, biography, and geography. The Englishman Ephraim Chambers went even further in describing his internationally influential Cyclopaedia (1728) as

an universal dictionary of arts and sciences; containing an explication of the terms, and an account of the things signified thereby, in the several arts, both liberal and mechanical, and the several sciences, human and divine, compiled from the best authors.

      No century has seen more public discussion of the nature of the encyclopaedia than the 18th; at the same time, there was much uncertainty concerning its ideal contents. The fine Italian encyclopaedia of Gianfrancesco Pivati (the secretary of the Academy of Sciences at Venice), the Nuovo dizionario scientifico e curioso, sacroprofano (1746–51; “New Scientific and Curious, Sacred-Profane Dictionary”), avoided the subject of history, whereas the German writer Philipp Balthasar Sinold von Schütz's Reales Staats- und Zeitungs-Lexicon (“Lexicon of Government and News”) concentrated on geography, theology, politics, and contemporary history and had to be supplemented by the German economist Paul Jacob Marperger's Curieuses Natur-, Kunst-, Berg-, Gewerk-, und Handlungslexikon (1712; “Curious Natural, Artistic, Mining, Craft, and Commercial Encyclopaedia”), which covered the sciences, art, and commerce.

      The introduction of the arts-and-sciences type of encyclopaedia inevitably hastened the use of specialist contributors, for it widened the total subject field considerably. Hübner (as Sinold von Schütz's encyclopaedia was known, from the writer of the preface) employed many contributors, and it is known from the draft prospectus of the British writer Oliver Goldsmith (Goldsmith, Oliver) that an encyclopaedia he projected was to have included comprehensive specialist articles by the lexicographer Samuel Johnson (Johnson, Samuel), the statesman Edmund Burke (Burke, Edmund), the portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds (Reynolds, Sir Joshua), the historian Edward Gibbon (Gibbon, Edward), the economist Adam Smith (Smith, Adam), and others. The remarkable progress made in this period can easily be judged when one compares the encyclopaedia Lucubrationes (1541), in which the author, Joachim Sterck van Ringelbergh, found it necessary to include a “miscellaneous” section (which he amusingly dubbed “Chaos”), with the approach of Johann Georg Krünitz, a German physician and philosopher, in his highly organized, modern Oekonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie (1773–1858; “Economic-Technological Encyclopaedia”) with its 242 volumes.

The modern encyclopaedia

      The period of the encyclopaedic dictionary was brilliant, but it gradually became apparent that, in abandoning the systematic encyclopaedia of the earlier period in favour of the quick reference dictionary form, quite as much had been lost as had been gained. The comparatively brief entries in the encyclopaedic dictionary had, by accident of the alphabet, fragmented knowledge to such an extent that users received only a disjointed knowledge of the things in which they were interested. Nor had the willful and extremely individualistic effort of the French encyclopaedists Diderot and d'Alembert done more than confuse the issue, for they had bent the principles of encyclopaedia making to their own purposes.

 In the 18th century an initial solution to the problem was found by Andrew Bell (Bell, Andrew), Colin Macfarquhar (Macfarquhar, Colin), and William Smellie (Smellie, William), three Scotsmen who were responsible for the first edition (1768–71) of Encyclopædia Britannica. Aware of the shortcomings of the Encyclopédie, they devised a new plan. Their encyclopaedia was to include about 45 principal subjects (distinguished by titles printed across the whole page), supported by another 30 lengthy articles, the whole being contained within one alphabetical sequence interspersed with numerous brief entries enhanced by references, where appropriate, to the principal subjects. Some of the principal articles, notably those on medical subjects, extended to more than 100 pages each. The three collaborators had thus incorporated the comprehensive treatment of important subjects accorded by the earliest form of encyclopaedias and had supplemented this with the attraction of the brief informative notices of minor topics that had been the chief feature of the encyclopaedic dictionary. The key to their success was, however, their retention of the single alphabetical sequence.

      Meanwhile, Renatus Gotthelf Löbel was planning to compile an encyclopaedia that could supersede Hübner. It was Sinold von Schütz who, in the fourth edition of Hübner, had introduced the word Conversations-Lexikon into the title, and it was Löbel who decided to give it pride of place in his new encyclopaedia. The Konversationslexikon was designed to provide the rapidly growing German bourgeoisie with the background knowledge considered essential for entry into the polite society of the day. When Brockhaus (Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold) took over Löbel's bankrupt and incomplete encyclopaedia, he saw the value and appeal of this evocative word and retained it (in various spellings) for many years afterward. Löbel's and Brockhaus's solution to the problem of the form of the modern encyclopaedia was not the same as the Britannica's; it is interesting to note that, whereas the Britannica model has widely prevailed throughout the English-speaking world, Brockhaus (Brockhaus Enzyklopädie) has been the model for most of the encyclopaedias prepared in countries in which English is not widely spoken.

      Brockhaus, throughout its existence, has faithfully followed a system in which the whole of knowledge has been categorized into very specific topics. These topics are arranged alphabetically, and, under each heading, condensed entries convey the essential information. By ingenious cross-references, entries are linked with other entries under which further information can be found, thus avoiding the inclusion of an index. There is no difficulty in distinguishing encyclopaedias of the Konversationslexikon form from encyclopaedic dictionaries. The former are usually of considerable size (Der grosse Brockhaus, 1928–35, included 200,000 articles by more than 1,000 authors) and possess elaborate cross-reference schemes. Moreover, whenever a really important subject occurs, considerable space is allowed, though the same principle of concentrated text is followed.

      Although the Britannica and Brockhaus examples eventually became the models for 19th- and 20th-century encyclopaedias, there were many survivals from the previous periods. Ersch and Gruber's enormous Allgemeine Encyclopädie (Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste) (1818–89; “General Encyclopaedia”) has been cited as a true example of the medieval “summa”—it is famed for including one of the longest articles in any encyclopaedia, that on Greece, which fills 3,668 pages in volumes 80–87. The Encyclopédie française is an even later example of this form, and, as Samuel Taylor Coleridge planned it, the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana could have proved the supreme example of this type of treatment. Meanwhile, the encyclopaedic dictionary has never died, and, at the very time when Brockhaus and the Britannica were building their markets, Noah Webster (Webster, Noah) was developing his dictionary's reputation for reliability.

Children's encyclopaedias (children's literature)

      Before the 19th century, only Johann Wagenseil had produced an encyclopaedia for children—the Pera Librorum Juvenilium (1695; “Collection of Juvenile Books”). Larousse issued Petite Encyclopédie du jeune âge (“Small Children's Encyclopaedia”) in 1853, but the next, Encyclopédie Larousse des enfants (“Larousse Encyclopaedia for Children”), did not appear until 1957. The first of the modern children's encyclopaedias was, however, a long-standing favourite. Prepared by the English writer and editor Arthur Mee, it was called The Children's Encyclopaedia (1910) in Great Britain and The Book of Knowledge (1912) in the United States. The contents comprised vividly written and profusely illustrated articles; because the system of article arrangement was obscure, much of the success of the work as a reference tool resulted from its splendidly contrived index, which remains a model of its kind. Mee later produced a completely pictorial encyclopaedia, I See All (1928–30), that comprised thousands of small illustrations, each accompanied by only a few words of text. Librarians treasured it for its reference value. In 1917–18 a completely new children's encyclopaedia was published, The World Book Encyclopedia (World Book Encyclopedia, The), which the title page described as “organized knowledge in story and picture.” A success from the start, it issued enlarged editions in quick succession. In 1925 a volume devoted to reading courses and study units was added. Annual supplements were provided from 1922 onward. In 1961 a Braille edition in 145 volumes was issued; most of the illustrations were eliminated in this, but many of the diagrams and graphs were retained. In 1964 a separate 30-volume set in a special large type was published for the use of the partially blind.

      World War I put a halt to the idea of issuing a Britannica Junior, and the first edition of such a work was not published until 1934. It was based on Weedon's Modern Encyclopedia, whose copyright had been bought by Britannica. Renamed Britannica Junior Encyclopædia in 1963 (and revised until 1983), it was specifically designed for children in elementary-school grades. One of its features was its ready-reference index volume, which combined short fact entries with indexing to longer general articles. In 1960 a British Children's Britannica was issued in London. Prepared under the direction of John Armitage, London editor of Encyclopædia Britannica, its contents were determined largely by material covered in the so-called 11-plus standardized tests given in Britain. A yearbook supplement was added later.

      In 1970 a new encyclopaedia, called The Young Children's Encyclopedia, was issued by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Prepared specifically for children just learning to read and not yet in elementary school, it consisted of 16 volumes, in which all the illustrations were in colour and the accompanying informative text brief. After its original appearance, the set was translated into several languages, including Japanese and Korean.

 In 1894 Frank E. Compton sold a U.S. school encyclopaedia, the Students Cyclopedia, from door to door to pay his way through college. This later became the New Students Reference Work, which Compton finally bought. While continuing to publish this, Compton designed a completely new and, for those times, revolutionary work, which first appeared in 1922 as Compton's Pictured Encyclopedia (Compton's Encyclopedia and Fact-Index). In due course, the system of continuous revision was introduced, close cooperation with educational and library advisers was fostered, and contributions from well-known authors were encouraged. In 1971 Compton's, by then published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., and renamed Compton's Encyclopedia and Fact-Index, introduced Compton's Young Children's Precyclopedia (renamed Compton's Precyclopedia in 1973), based on The Young Children's Encyclopedia described above. In 1989 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., introduced Compton's MultiMedia Encyclopedia, the first multimedia CD-ROM encyclopaedia; it contained all the information of the printed set as well as sound and animation.

      Unlike World Book, Compton's, and the Britannica Junior Encyclopædia, the Oxford Junior Encyclopaedia (intended for children of age 11 upward) was systematically arranged. Each of the 12 text volumes is devoted to a broad subject field: humankind, natural history, the universe, communications, great lives, farming and fisheries, industry and commerce, engineering, recreations, law and society, home and health, and the arts. The 13th volume was an index with ready-reference material. The contents of each volume were arranged alphabetically (with cross-references), and there were many illustrations.

Specialized encyclopaedias

Special interests

      Most encyclopaedias have been compiled from a purely scholarly point of view and have had no particular ax to grind, though nearly all have been inhibited to a certain extent by the interests and policies of the milieu in which they appeared. There are, however, several encyclopaedias that have been planned deliberately for a special purpose. One that is unique and continues to be of the greatest value to historians is the work of the 16th-century Spanish Franciscan Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, who spent much of his life in missionary work in Mexico. Sahagún was ordered to write in Nahuatl (Nahuatl language) the information needed by his colleagues for the conversion of the indigenous peoples of the region. The result, the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España (“General History of the Matters of New Spain”), was a magnificent record of the Aztec culture as recounted by the American Indians of south-central Mexico. The arrangement of this work, written in pictorial language as well as in Spanish, followed the familiar medieval pattern and resembled most closely that of Bartholomaeus Anglicus (Sahagún may have been familiar with a recent translation of Bartholomaeus's encyclopaedia). Historia is one of the most remarkable encyclopaedias ever compiled.

      Many of both the Arabic and Chinese classical encyclopaedias were compiled with the object of helping civil service candidates in their studies and of providing administrators with the cultural background needed for their work. Their interest to historians of the two cultures can well be understood, for their arrangement and contents throw useful light on the concepts of administration and justice (to name only two aspects) in the Chinese and Islamic worlds during the 7th to 15th centuries.

      Of the Western medieval encyclopaedias, the most interesting in this respect is the De naturis rerum (c. 1228–44) of the Dominican friar Thomas de Cantimpré. His aim was that of St. Augustine (Augustine, Saint): to unite in a single volume the whole of human knowledge concerning the nature of things, particularly the nature of animals, with a view toward using it as an introduction to theology.

      Religion and politics were the main motives for writing encyclopaedias with a special purpose. Louis Moréri made no secret of his intention to produce an encyclopaedia that would defend the teaching and policies of the Roman Catholic Church. Antoine Furetière and Pierre Bayle, on the other hand, represented the philosophers, and their anticlerical bias was more in tune with the skeptical minds of the age. Nevertheless, there was still a strong orthodox following in France, as the long-continuing demand for the Dictionnaire universel of the Jesuit fathers of Trévoux demonstrated, and this encyclopaedia was as firmly in defense of Catholicism as the Encyclopédie was critical of it.

      Diderot and d'Alembert's encyclopaedia had originally been intended by its publisher to be no more than an adaptation of Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia. The outcome was a giant reference work that criticized the government, satirized the Calvinist clergy of Geneva, championed the Enlightenment, and supported an atheistic materialism. To the more rigid members of the French establishment, the encyclopaedia was a monster. The more worldly, however, had no objection to a work whose succeeding volumes were each an audacious source of scandal.

      Even the French encyclopaedist Pierre Larousse (Larousse, Pierre) was not impartial. His finest encyclopaedia, the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIX^e siècle (1865–90; “Great Universal Dictionary of the 19th Century”), one of the most influential of the century, was deliberately anticlerical in policy. And Johann Gottfried von Herder (Herder, Johann Gottfried von), in the heart of Roman Catholic Germany, produced a counterweight to the Protestant Brockhaus in his Konversations-Lexikon (1853–57)—soon called, simply, Herder—which adopted a distinctive Catholic viewpoint. This excellent encyclopaedia was early recognized for its general impartiality, scholarship, and accuracy. In the long run, both Herder and Brockhaus gradually eliminated their sectarian inclinations.

Historical development of topical works

      The alternative title of the 12th-century Speculum universale (“Universal Mirror”) of a French preacher, Raoul Ardent (a follower of Gilbert de La Porrée, a French theologian), was the Summa de vitiis et virtutibus (“Summa [Exposition] of Faults and Virtues”). Raoul's intent was to provide a modern authoritative account of the Christian attitude to the world. His plan was different from that of other encyclopaedists, for he limited his work to the discussion (in this order) of theology, Christ and the redemption, the practical and ascetic life, thought, prayer, ethics, the four cardinal virtues, human conduct, and the four senses. This work could, in fact, be termed the first of the specialized, or topical, encyclopaedias.

      Apart from isolated examples, and the technical encyclopaedia of Theophilus, the specialized encyclopaedia did not really make an appearance until the 18th century. The stimulus was probably provided by the increasing number of encyclopaedias that included the arts and sciences to such a point that some of them included little else. In any classified encyclopaedia the individual classes do, of course, constitute a kind of specialized encyclopaedia, but such a work is not sufficiently self-contained to stand on its own. As the boundaries of knowledge contained in encyclopaedias expanded, there were at least some attempts to produce specialized works of this kind.

Biography

      The first real effort toward a specialized encyclopaedia was made in the mid-18th century, and the subject field that it treated was biography. The Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon (1750–51; “General Scholarly Lexicon”) was compiled by Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, a German biographer, and issued by Gleditsch, the publisher of both Hübner and Marperger's work and the opponent of Zedler's encyclopaedia. Jöcher's work was continued by the German philologist Johann Cristoph Adelung (Adelung, Johann Christoph) and others and is still of value today. The field of international biography is not a simple one to tackle, and there were only two further efforts of note: J.C.F. Hoefer compiled the Nouvelle Biographie générale (1852–66; “New General Biography”), and J.F. Michaud was responsible for the Biographie universelle (1811–62; “Universal Biography”). These two great works were to a certain extent competitive, which helped to improve their coverage and content; they are still used in research libraries. After their publication, the task of recording biographical information on a universal scale reverted to the general encyclopaedias.

Chemistry, music, and philosophy

      Developments in the field of specialized encyclopaedias correspond closely to other developments in the world of scholarship. It is, for example, no accident that so much attention should be paid to the subject of chemistry at a time when L.F.F. von Crell was issuing his series of abstract journals on chemistry. The English scientist and inventor William Nicholson (Nicholson, William) was first in the field with his Dictionary of Chemistry (1795), published by Sir Richard Phillips (who later issued C.T. Watkin's Portable Cyclopaedia). On this was based Andrew Ure's Dictionary of Chemistry, which was for a long time the standard reference work on the subject in Great Britain. In 1807 the German chemist Martin Heinrich Klaproth (Klaproth, Martin Heinrich) issued his Chemisches Wörterbuch (“Chemical Dictionary”), but a more important event was the publication of the Handbuch der theoretischen Chemie (1817–19; “Handbook of Theoretical Chemistry”) by the German scientist Leopold Gmelin, a work of such excellence that long after its first publication it still appeared in new editions from the Gmelin-Institut. Heinrich Rose, a German chemist, issued his Ausführliches Handbuch der analytischen Chemie (“Complete Handbook of Analytic Chemistry”) in 1851, and the first edition of Liebig, Poggendorff, and Wöhler's famous Handwörterbuch der reinen und angewandten Chemie (“Handbook of Pure and Applied Chemistry”) was issued in 1837; its second edition (1856–65) was expanded to nine volumes. This work was continued by Hermann Fehling's Neues Handwörterbuch der Chemie (1871–1930; “New Pocket Dictionary of Chemistry”). The French counterpart, Charles-Adolphe Wurtz (Wurtz, Charles-Adolphe)'s Dictionnaire de chimie pure et appliquée (1869–1908; “Dictionary of Pure and Applied Chemistry”), became the standard work of its day. The Russian-born chemist Friedrich Konrad Beilstein (Beilstein, Friedrich Konrad) first issued his Handbuch der organischen Chemie (“Handbook of Organic Chemistry”) in Hamburg, Ger., in 1880–83; it is the most extensive work of its kind today, comprising more than 300 volumes (and, at the end of the 20th century, two computer databases). The French chemist Edmond Frémy (Frémy, Edmond)'s Encyclopédie chimique (“Chemical Encyclopaedia”) appeared in 1882–99, and A Dictionary of Applied Chemistry, edited by Sir Thomas Edward Thorpe (Thorpe, Sir Thomas Edward), the English chemist, was first issued in 1890–93. Standard works of the 20th century include Fritz Ullmann's Enzyklopädie der technischen Chemie (1914–23; “Encyclopaedia of Applied Chemistry”), Victor Grignard (Grignard, Victor)'s Traité de chimie organique (1935; “Treatise on Organic Chemistry”), Elsevier's Encyclopaedia of Organic Chemistry (1940), the Encyclopedia of Chemical Technology (1947–56; known by the names of its principal editors as Kirk-Othmer), Waldemar Koglin's Kurzes Handbuch der Chemie (1951; “Short Handbook of Chemistry”), and the indispensable CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics, which by 2003 had run to 84 editions.

      The impressive run of encyclopaedias and handbooks of chemistry over so long a period is paralleled only in the field of music, in which the Musikalisches Lexikon (1732; “Musical Lexicon”) of the German composer and music lexicographer Johann Gottfried Walther (Walther, Johann Gottfried) began the trend and was supplemented by the very successful Historisch-biographisches Lexicon der Tonkünstler (1790–92; “Historical and Biographical Lexicon of Musicians”) of the German organist and music historian Ernst Ludwig Gerber. The Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique (1835–44; “Universal Biography of Musicians and General Bibliography of Music”) was compiled by the director of the Brussels Conservatoire, the Belgian composer François-Joseph Fétis (Fétis, François-Joseph), almost coinciding with the equally voluminous Encyklopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften (“Encyclopaedia of Collected Musical Knowledge”) of Gustav Schilling, a German lexicographer and historian of music. A pupil of Mendelssohn, Hermann Mendel, founded the Musikalisches Conversations-Lexikon (1870), which was completed by August Reissmann, who also edited the musicologist and composer Auguste Gathy's Musikalisches Conversationslexikon (1871). The great Encyclopédie de la musique et dictionnaire du Conservatoire (1913–31) was begun by the French writer on music Albert Lavignac and continued by Lionel de La Laurencie, but the third part, a dictionary of names and subjects covered in the preceding parts, was never issued. Walter Willson Cobbett compiled the Cyclopedic Survey of Chamber Music (1929–30), and the English writer on music Sir George Grove (Grove, Sir George) first issued his Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1879–89; it went through five editions until a new work, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, appeared in 1980. A 29-volume second edition of the New Grove appeared in 2001 and also became available online. The German music historian Hugo Riemann (Riemann, Hugo) compiled his standard Musik-Lexikon in 1882, and the musicologist Friedrich Blume the comprehensive Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1949–86; “Music of the Past and Present”); a second edition, by Ludwig Finscher, began publication in 1994.

      The publication of the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich)'s Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1817; “Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Knowledge”) was of more than subject importance in that it was a compendium of the author's philosophical system (philosophy) in three parts: Logic, Nature, Mind. It influenced many editors of general encyclopaedias during the rest of the century. The standard work in this field was for many years the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology (new ed. 1960, reprinted 1998) edited by the American psychologist James Mark Baldwin (Baldwin, James Mark), though the publication of The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967, reprinted 1996) provided a substantial work more in line with modern tastes. Other works in this area include the Centro di Studi Filosofici di Gallarate's Enciclopedia filosofica (1957), the French philosopher André Lalande's Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie (“Technical and Critical Vocabulary of Philosophy”), first issued 1902–12, and the Austrian writer Rudolph Eisler's Wörterbuch der philosophischen Begriffe (“Dictionary of Philosophical Concepts”). The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998), edited by Edward Craig, was the first multivolume encyclopaedia published in the discipline in more than 30 years, and it was also made available online.

Other topics

      The Architectural Publication Society began issuing its Dictionary of architecture as early as 1852, but it took 40 years to complete. A work more modern in tone is Wasmuths Lexikon der Baukunst (1929–37; “Wasmuth's Lexicon of Architecture”). Further material is included in the Encyclopedia of World Art (1959–68), the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum (“Encyclopaedia for Antiquity and Christianity”; begun 1950), the Enciclopedia dell'arte antica, classica e orientale (1958–66; “Encyclopaedia of Ancient, Classical, and Oriental Art”), and Grove's Dictionary of Art (1996; also online).

      The informal title Pauly-Wissowa is very familiar to a great number of people. August von Pauly (1796–1845), the German Classical philologist, began issuing his Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft (“Encyclopaedia of Classical Antiquities”) in 1837. The new edition was begun by another German Classical philologist, Georg Wissowa, in 1893. This enormous work on Classical studies has no equal in any part of the world, though it can be supplemented in some areas by the encyclopaedic series Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft (“Handbook of Antiquities”) begun in 1887.

      The Swiss theologian Johann Jakob Herzog (Herzog, Johann Jakob) gave religion its first great encyclopaedia with his Real-Encyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche (1854–68; “Encyclopaedia of the Protestant Theology and Church”). Philip Schaff (Schaff, Philip), a Swiss-born American church historian, prepared the abridged English edition (1882–84) from which The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge stems. James Hastings, a Scottish clergyman, was responsible for no fewer than four encyclopaedic works in this field: A Dictionary of the Bible (1898–1904); A Dictionary of Christ and the Gospels (1906–08); Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics (1908–26); and Dictionary of the Apostolic Church (1915–18). An even more significant series is the Encyclopédie des sciences ecclésiastiques (“Encyclopaedia of the Ecclesiastical Sciences”), on which work was continuing at the turn of the 21st century. It comprises the Dictionnaire de la Bible (1907–12 and ongoing supplements), Dictionnaire de théologie catholique (1909–50), Dictionnaire d'archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie (1928–53), Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastiques (begun 1912), and Dictionnaire de droit canonique (1935–65; “Dictionary of Canon Law”). Other important works are The Catholic Encyclopedia (1907–18), which has not been completely superseded by the New Catholic Encyclopedia, 2nd ed. (2003); the finely illustrated Enciclopedia cattolica (1948–54); Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1909–13; “Religion in the Past and Present”); and the Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche (1930–38; “Lexicon of Theology and the Church”). Other significant encyclopaedias of religion include The Encyclopaedia of Islam (new ed., begun 1960); the Encyclopaedia Judaica (1972); and The Encyclopedia of Religion (1987), edited by Mircea Eliade (Eliade, Mircea).

      It was not until the 1860s that three of the most useful handbooks that were in daily use late into the 20th century began to appear. The Statesman's Year-Book, important for its statistical and political (social science) information, began publication in 1864. In 1868 the English publisher Joseph Whitaker first issued his Whitaker's Almanack (almanac), and the World Almanack started in the same year. The Chicago Daily News Almanac appeared from 1885 to 1946, and the Information Please Almanac began in 1947. Herder's Staatslexikon (“Lexicon of Political Science”) was first published in 1889–97; this compendium was soon followed by the Dictionary of Political Economy (1894) by the English banker and economist Sir Robert Palgrave. In 1930–35 the Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences was published; an immediate success, it is often referred to as Seligman after the name of its chief editor. The International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (1968) did not supersede it in every respect. In a similar fashion, the Handwörterbuch der Sozialwissenschaften (1952–68; “Pocket Dictionary of the Social Sciences”) supplemented rather than superseded the standard Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften, (“Pocket Dictionary of Political Science”; 4th ed., 1923–39). By the start of the 21st century, many world almanacs were published annually.

      In the field of literature, if Isaac Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature (1791) is ruled out, the first important handbook is the Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870) by the English clergyman and schoolmaster Ebenezer Cobham Brewer (1810–97), supplemented with Brewer's Reader's Handbook (1879). Other important works include the Dizionario letterario Bompiani degli autori (1956–57; “Bompiani's Literary Dictionary of Authors”), the Dizionario letterario Bompiani delle opere (1947–50; “Bompiani's Literary Dictionary of Works”), Cassell's Encyclopaedia of Literature (1953), the Oxford and Cambridge “companions” to various world literatures, and the Dictionary of Literary Biography (begun 1978).

      In the last quarter of the 19th century, the fields of botany, engineering, and mathematics saw three major specialized encyclopaedias issued: Dictionnaire de botanique (1876–92; “Dictionary of Botany”) of the French naturalist and physician Henri Baillon, the Lexikon der gesamten Technik (1894–99; “Lexicon of Collected Technology”) of the German engineer Otto Lueger, and the Berlin Academy's Enzyklopädie der mathematische Wissenschaften (1898–1935; “Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences”). The last was shortly followed by the important but incomplete Encyclopédie des sciences mathématiques pures et appliquées (1904–14; “Encyclopaedia of Theoretical and Applied Mathematical Sciences”).

       physics never received the degree of attention that the encyclopaedists accorded to chemistry and chemical engineering. The standard Dictionary of Applied Physics of the English physicist Sir Richard Glazebrook was first issued 1922–23. The Handbuch der Physik (“Handbook of Physics”) was issued from 1926 to 1929; the second edition (1955–84) is often referred to by the name of its editor, Siegfried Flügge. Another work is the Encyclopaedic Dictionary of Physics (1961–64; and four supplements, 1966–75), edited by James Thewlis. In medicine (medicine, history of) the pioneer British Encyclopaedia of Medical Practice (1936–39) was followed by The Encyclopaedia of General Practice (1963).

      Other important encyclopaedias and handbooks with their origins in the 20th century include The Encyclopedia of Photography (1949); the superbly illustrated and well-documented Enciclopedia dello spettacolo (1954–62; “Encyclopaedia of the Stage”), which includes all forms of staged entertainment; the Dictionnaire du cinéma et de la télévision (1965–71; “Dictionary of the Cinema and Television”); the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology (1960; 9th ed., 2002); and the Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science (2nd ed., 2003).

Encyclopaedias of countries and regions

      A special kind of encyclopaedia dealing with a single country or region began to appear in the late 19th century. Sometimes it is possible to distinguish, by a subtle form of titling, those national encyclopaedias that deal with the world scene from those that concentrate chiefly on their own country. Thus, the “Ruritanian Encyclopaedia” can usually be taken to be a work produced in Ruritania that takes a world view, while the “Encyclopaedia of Ruritania” probably deals mainly with Ruritania and the surrounding areas.

      The encyclopaedias of geography are of particular use in this field because they cover in detail many islands, small cities, and other features that are dealt with in only the briefest fashion elsewhere. Of the modern geographic encyclopaedias the following are of especial importance: Westermanns Lexikon der Geographie (1968–72), Meyers Kontinente und Meere (1968–73; “Meyer's Continents and Seas”), the Russian Kratkaya geograficheskaya entsiklopedya (1960–66; “Short Geographic Encyclopaedia”), and the Länderlexikon (1953–60; “Geographic Dictionary”). These encyclopaedias have an additional value as sources of maps and illustrations that would be difficult to find elsewhere.

Electronic encyclopaedias

      Given the rapid pace of technological advancement in the contemporary world, it was to be expected that encyclopaedia publishers would seek ways to exploit new technologies (information science) in the field of information storage, retrieval, and distribution (information system). During the 1960s and '70s these new technologies revolutionized the manner in which article text was generated, modified as needed, and composed and output for printing. The computer terminal, typically linked to a large mainframe computer where the encyclopaedia's contents were stored as an electronic database on magnetic tape or disc, became the key to editorial production. By the 1980s and '90s the phenomenal growth of telecommunications networks and personal computer systems presented a new possibility to the publishing industry—the delivery of encyclopaedic databases through a medium other than the printed page. Many general and specialized encyclopaedias began publishing electronic versions of their databases—on CD-ROM (compact disc read-only memory) and DVD-ROM (digital videodisc read-only memory) products and as online services. As computer technology developed through the turn of the 21st century, the electronic encyclopaedia became less a version of the print set than a stand-alone product that presented a database in the manner best suited to the electronic medium.

      One advantage of the electronic medium (electronics) is the huge storage capacity that it offers at very low cost. Freed from manufacturing expenses, electronic encyclopaedias are able to expand far beyond their print versions. Electronic presentation also makes articles more readily accessible: in addition to the alphabetical indexes compiled for the print sets, electronic encyclopaedias feature high-speed search software that can retrieve an exhaustive set of files in response to specific queries.

      The most obvious advantage of electronic encyclopaedias is in their multimedia capabilities, with animated graphics, recorded sound, and video recordings supplementing the text, photographs, and line drawings inherited from the print medium. With the development of more sophisticated data-processing applications, there arises the potential for truly interactive (interactive multimedia) encyclopaedias, which allow readers to retrieve, manipulate, and classify information according to their own designs.

CD-ROM encyclopaedias

      The electronic medium was developed most quickly and visibly on CD-ROM by smaller encyclopaedias or those intended for younger readers. In 1985 Grolier, Inc., issued its Academic American Encyclopedia on CD-ROM. This text-only version received still illustrations in 1990, and in 1992, with the addition of audio and video, it became the New Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia. Multimedia enhancement had been introduced in 1989 by Compton's MultiMedia Encyclopedia, owned by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. Four years later the Microsoft Corporation released Microsoft Encarta Multimedia Encyclopedia, which enhanced the text of Funk & Wagnall's New Encyclopedia with extensive graphics, audio, and video.

      Larger encyclopaedias initially stressed the research potential of the electronic medium. World Book, Inc., and Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., issued the texts of their print sets on CD-ROM in 1989 and 1993, respectively. In 1994 still illustrations were added to World Book's Information Finder, and that same year the Britannica CD was released with text supplemented by still illustrations and by Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary.

Online encyclopaedias

      In 1983 the Academic American Encyclopedia became the first encyclopaedia to be presented to a mass market online by the licensing of its text to commercial data networks, which eventually included CompuServe and Prodigy Information Service. Nine years later Compton's Encyclopedia licensed its text to America Online (AOL), another commercial information provider. In 1994 Britannica Online was released for subscription over the Internet. In addition to the full text database and thousands of illustrations, Britannica Online served as a gateway to the World Wide Web by providing direct links to outside sources of information.

Robert L. Collison Warren E. Preece Ed.

      In 2001 the English-language version of Wikipedia was launched. A free, Internet-based encyclopaedia operating under an open-source (open source) management style, it had grown to two million articles by September 2007, and it—along with many versions in other languages—continues to expand rapidly.

Ed.

History of encyclopaedias

Encyclopaedias in the West

Early development

      The first fragments of an encyclopaedia to have survived are the work of Speusippus (died 339/338 BC), a nephew of Plato's. Speusippus conveyed his uncle's ideas in a series of writings on natural history, mathematics, philosophy, and so forth. Aristotle's wide-ranging lectures at the Lyceum were equally influential, and he and Plato appear to have been the originators of the encyclopaedia as a means of providing a comprehensive cultural background.

      The Greek approach was to record the spoken word. The Romans (Latin literature), on the other hand, aimed to epitomize existing knowledge in readable form. Their first known effort is the Praecepta ad filium (“Advice to His Son”; c. 183 BC), a series of letters (now lost) written by the Roman consul Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato, Marcus Porcius) (known as Cato the Censor) to his son. Cato's intention was to provide a summary of useful information that could help in the process of living and in guiding and helping one's fellow men. A more substantial attempt was made by the learned Latin writer Marcus Terentius Varro (Varro, Marcus Terentius) in his Disciplinarum libri IX (“Nine Books of Disciplines”), his Rerum divinarum et humanarum antiquitates (“The Antiquities of Things Divine and Human”), and his Imagines, which together covered the liberal arts, human efforts, the gods, and biographies of the Greeks and Romans.

      The most important Roman contribution was the Historia naturalis of Pliny the Elder, a vast work constituting a kind of classified anthology of information. Although undiscriminating in its record of fact and fancy, it was nevertheless very influential; the Latin grammarian and writer Gaius Julius Solinus drew nearly 90 percent of his 3rd-century Collectanea rerum memorabilium (“Collection of Memorabilia”) from Pliny, and the Historia naturalis served as a major source for other encyclopaedias for at least the next 1,500 years. Even today it is still an important record for details of Roman sculpture and painting.

      The statesman Cassiodorus, when he withdrew to the Vivarium in 551, dedicated this monastery to sacred and classical learning. His Institutiones divinarum et saecularium litterarum (“Institutes of Divine and Secular Literature”) seems to have been designed to preserve knowledge in times that were largely inimical to it. In his encyclopaedia, Cassiodorus drew a clear distinction between the sacred and the profane, but the first Christian encyclopaedia to be compiled for the benefit of the newly converted Spanish population followed a different scheme. St. Isidore (Isidore of Sevilla, Saint) (c. 560–636) considered the liberal arts and secular learning to be the true basis of a Christian's education. His Etymologiae therefore paid much attention to practical matters and even included an etymological dictionary. This was in line with the thought of St. Jerome (Jerome, Saint)—on whose encyclopaedic Chronicon and De viris illustribus St. Isidore had drawn—who, in common with the early Christian Fathers, was eager to provide a basis for a Christian interpretation and organization of knowledge. This concept was much later to be renewed by the Catalan ecclesiastic Ramon Llull (Llull, Ramon).

      The development of the encyclopaedia during the next 500 years (Middle Ages), though of social interest, was undistinguished from the point of view of scholarship. Rabanus Maurus (c. 776–856), one of the English scholar Alcuin's favourite pupils, compiled De universo (“On the Universe”), which, despite its being an unintelligent plagiarism of St. Isidore's work, had a lasting popularity and influence throughout the medieval period. A series of encyclopaedias of special subjects—undistinguished anthologies of classical and Christian writings on history, jurisprudence, agriculture, medicine, veterinary surgery, and zoology—was organized by the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (905–959). Michael Psellus (Psellus, Michael) (1018–96), a tutor of a later emperor, contributed a more interesting work, De omnifaria doctrina, in the form of questions and answers on both the humanities and science. At this time there was a growing influence on metropolitan and secular learning. In an attempt to counterbalance it, the brief but charming Didascalion of Hugh of Saint-Victor (c. 1096–1141), which paid much attention to practical matters as well as to the liberal arts, was soundly based on a profound classification of knowledge that influenced many later encyclopaedias. About this time an encyclopaedic dictionary known as Suda, or Suidas, broke with tradition by adopting alphabetical order for its contents. This had no effect on the plan of later encyclopaedias, but its contents included so much useful information that it has retained its importance as a source throughout the succeeding centuries.

      The Liber floridus (c. 1120) of Lambert of Saint-Omer is an unoriginal miscellany, but it has an interest of its own in that it discards practical matters in favour of metaphysical discussion and pays special attention to such subjects as magic and astrology. The greatest achievement of the 12th century was the Imago mundi of Honorius Inclusus. Honorius produced his “mirror of the world” for Christian, later abbot of St. Jacob, and drew on a far wider range of authorities than any of his predecessors. The arrangement of the first section on geography, astrology, and astronomy was sound; it started with the creation and worked down to individual countries and cities. This was followed by a “chronicle,” and a third section provided a brief list of important events since the fall of Satan. Honorius accurately foresaw his book's fate: innumerable copies, unauthorized plagiarisms, incessant criticism, and incompetent additions for at least 200 years.

      Probably the first encyclopaedia to be compiled by a woman, the Hortus deliciarum of the abbess Herrad (died 1195), comprised a magnificent illuminated manuscript with 636 miniatures, intended to help and edify the nuns in her charge. Bartholomaeus Anglicus based his De proprietatibus rerum (1220–40) on the works of St. Isidore and Pliny. It was designed for ordinary people and became Europe's most popular encyclopaedia for the next three centuries. But the outstanding achievement of the Middle Ages was the Speculum majus of Vincent Of Beauvais. Vincent was not an original writer but he was industrious, and his work comprised nearly 10,000 chapters in 80 books; no encyclopaedia rivalled it in size until the middle of the 18th century. The work was very well balanced, almost equal space being allotted to the three sections. The “Naturale” dealt with God and man, the creation, and natural history. For this Vincent drew not only on Latin writings but also on Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew sources, which were at that time (through translations) making a very considerable impact on the thinking of the West. The “Doctrinale” covered practical matters as well as the scholastic heritage of the age. The “Historiale” included a summary of the first two sections and a history of the world from the creation to the times of St. Louis. A fourth section, “Morale,” based principally on St. Thomas Aquinas, was added after Vincent's death. The influence of the Speculum majus was immediate and lasting. Translations were made into several languages, and complete reprints appeared as late as 1863–79. One of its many values is that it is a source for extracts from many documents of which no other parts have survived. Another is its detailed history of the second quarter of the 13th century.

      Vincent's was the last major work of its kind. Later encyclopaedists began to compile for a wider public than the very limited world of religious communities. The first breakaway from Latin came with Li livres dou trésor (“Treasure Books”) of Brunetto Latini (Latini, Brunetto) (c. 1220–95), the master of Dante, and the Florentine poet and philosopher Guido Cavalcanti (Cavalcanti, Guido). Latini wanted to reach the mercantile and cultured classes of Italy; he therefore used French, their common language. The arrangement of his work was similar to Vincent's but his approach was concise. The language, the brevity, and the accuracy of his encyclopaedia had an immediate and wide appeal. A friend of Petrarch's, Pierre Bersuire, based his Reductorium, repertorium, et dictionarium morale utriusque testamenti (“Moral Abridgment, Catalogue, and Dictionary of Each Testament”; c. 1340) on Bartholomaeus's De proprietatibus rerum. In contrast to Latini's work, this was a return to the traditional, with its moralizings on the Bible, Ovid's Metamorphoses, and natural history, but it had a considerable success when printing was introduced, being issued 12 times by 1526.

      One of the most delightful of all encyclopaedias is the little Margarita philosophica that Gregor Reisch (died 1525) wrote for young people. In some 200 pages he contrived to cover in a very pleasing style the whole university course of the day, both the trivium and the quadrivium (see liberal arts). The arrival of humanism is reflected in the De disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives (Vives, Juan Luis), a pioneer in psychology and philosophical method; Vives grounded all his arguments on nature and made no appeal to religious authority. With the writing of the anonymous Compendium philosophiae (c. 1300), the concept of the modern scientific encyclopaedia was reached at last. It was the first encyclopaedia to adopt an inquiring and impartial attitude to the things described, and the old wives' tales that had filled so many pages of encyclopaedias from the time of Pliny onward were replaced by the latest scientific discoveries.

      The first indigenous French encyclopaedia, the popular Dictionarium historicum, geographicum, et poeticum (“Historical, Geographical, and Poetic Dictionary”) of Charles Estienne (1504–64), was not published until 1553. For encyclopaedias in their own language, the French still had to rely on translations of the encyclopaedias of other nations, such as Les diverses leçons (“The Various Lessons”; 1552) of Pedro Mexia, a mediocre Spanish historian whose haphazard compilation was enormously popular in the 16th and 17th centuries.

The development of the modern encyclopaedia (17th–18th centuries)

      Francis Bacon (Bacon, Francis Thomas)'s purpose in writing the Instauratio magna was “to commence a total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge, raised upon the proper foundations” in order to restore or cultivate a just and legitimate familiarity between things and the mind. Only a small part of this enormous work was ever completed, but the author had planned 130 sections divided into three main sections: external nature, man, and man's action on nature. From its proposed contents Bacon's intention was clearly to compile an encyclopaedia thoroughly scientific in character—“a thing infinite and beyond the powers of man”—that he himself recognized to be revolutionary in character. His most important contribution was, however, the devising of a new and thoroughly sound classification of knowledge that bears a remarkable resemblance to the classification put forward by Matthias Martini in his Idea Methodica (1606). Although Bacon was apparently unaware of this work, both philosophers were probably working from the same basic Platonic precepts. The results were profound: Diderot made a point of acknowledging the assistance Bacon's analysis of the structure of human knowledge had afforded him in planning the contents of the Encyclopédie, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge hailed “the coinciding precepts of the Athenian Verulam and the British Plato.”

      Only two more Latin encyclopaedias of any importance followed. Antonio Zara, bishop of Petina, compiled the Anatomia Ingeniorum et Scientiarum (“Anatomy of Arts and Sciences”; 1614), which was chiefly remarkable for the inclusion of an index. And Johann Heinrich Alsted, who, like Martini, came from Herborn, compiled an Encyclopaedia (1630) whose arrangement corresponds broadly to Matthias's classification of human knowledge.

      Zara's and Alsted's encyclopaedias were organized systematically by classification. The turning point came with Louis Moréri's alphabetically arranged Grand Dictionnaire historique (1674), which was especially strong in geographical and biographical material. Its success was immediate; six editions were issued by 1691, each incorporating much new contemporary information. English editions followed in 1694, 1701, and (a supplement) 1705. Other encyclopaedias in England, Germany, Switzerland, and The Netherlands acknowledged its inspiration. The alphabetically arranged encyclopaedia in the vernacular had almost won the day, in spite of the German scholar Daniel George Morhof's modest success with his ill-balanced Polyhistor Literarius, Philosophicus, et Practicus (“Literary, Philosophical, and Practical History”; 1688–1708).

      If there was any doubt concerning the more popular form of the encyclopaedia, the issue of Antoine Furetière (Furetière, Antoine)'s Dictionnaire universel des arts et sciences (1690) confirmed the true nature of public taste. Furetière not only compiled a fine encyclopaedic dictionary, but he emphasized the arts and the sciences, thus reflecting the rapidly growing public interest in modern culture, science, and technology. If confirmation were still needed, the Académie Française's commissioning of Thomas Corneille (Corneille, Thomas) to compile Le Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences (1694), with its thorough and authoritative treatment of these new encyclopaedic features, demonstrated that even the more conservative scholars were by now keenly aware that a new spirit had arisen. The period of the clerical encyclopaedia had ended, as the Franciscan friar Vincenzo Maria Coronelli found when his Biblioteca Universale Sacro-Profano (1701–06) ceased publication at volume 7 of a projected 45.

      Pierre Bayle (Bayle, Pierre), in his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), achieved a most remarkable tour de force. Although his encyclopaedia purported to be an updating of the information in Moréri, the entries were largely unexceptionable. The real originality of his work lies in the profuse and scholarly footnotes and the commentaries that at times were an amazing mixture of skepticism, blasphemy, and ribaldry. Bayle challenged orthodox ideas; his brilliant mind spared nothing. This approach heralded that of Denis Diderot, and the distinguished writers who revised later editions—Prosper Marchand and Pierre Desmaizeaux—continued in the same style.

      The Lexicon Technicum (1704) of John Harris represented the powerful impact of the work of the Royal Society (founded 1660). Here was all the equipment of the modern encyclopaedia: excellent engraved plates, clear practical text, bibliographies appended to the more important articles. So far, England had had to make do with translations of French encyclopaedias. Harris's emphasis on the need to include scientific and technical subjects helped to reverse the trend. This process was completed by the issue of Ephraim Chambers (Chambers, Ephraim)'s Cyclopaedia (Cyclopædia) (1728). Like Harris, Chambers omitted people in favour of more information on the arts and sciences, and he paid more attention to clear expositions of ancient and modern philosophical systems. His admirably cross-referenced work is universally recognized as the father of the modern encyclopaedia.

      The French were well aware of these developments. By 1744 five editions of Chambers's Cyclopaedia had been issued. The Paris publisher André Le Breton saw a ready market for a translation. The first proposals were a failure, however, and Diderot (Diderot, Denis) was enlisted to plan what at that time was still essentially a translation on a much broader basis. Under the hands of Diderot and Jean Le Rond d'Alembert (Alembert, Jean Le Rond d') the concept changed. The Encyclopédie (1751–65) was a philosophical undertaking carried out on a gigantic scale, and much of the writing was of a high standard. To the orthodox, it appeared that the project had got out of hand, but there were 2,000 subscribers to the first volume, and the subsequent scandals over the irreverent, authority-challenging articles only added to the number of purchasers. The equivocal attitude of high dignitaries in both church and court and the growing public dislike of the encyclopaedia's chief critics—the Jesuits—led to a complex situation in which official disapproval and substantial private encouragement caused the production and fortunes of the Encyclopédie and its producers to lurch dangerously from one crisis to another. Curiously, Diderot did nothing to further the physical development of the encyclopaedia; his contribution was to fire men's minds with a willful guidance that conformed to the country's increasingly revolutionary spirit. As Voltaire said: “this vast and immortal work seems to reproach mankind's brief life span.”

      The shortcomings of the Encyclopédie were obvious. The essential ingredients of an encyclopaedia, the entries on every conceivable subject, had been sacrificed to make place for lengthy polemics on the controversial topics of the day. The Encyclopædia Britannica was intended to improve on this, and, with all its shortcomings, the first edition (1768–71) did exactly that. The achievement of its editors was the more remarkable in that there were already several English encyclopaedias on the market. The Scottish encyclopaedia, however, reflected the taste of the day better than any of its competitors, for it was a completely new work and not just a remaking of Chambers and Harris. There was much to criticize in the first edition, but the second (1777–84; dated 1778–83) was greatly improved, as were following editions.

      Meanwhile, Germany, at first largely dependent on translations of foreign encyclopaedias, had produced the scholarly “Hübner” (1704), as it was known from the name of the author of the preface in this first of the Konversationslexikon type. The form appealed to the rapidly growing middle class of the country, who welcomed encyclopaedias designed to provide them with an adequate cultural background for polite society. Johann Theodor Jablonski's illustrated Allgemeines Lexicon (1721) continued in this same style, and similar works were compiled by the Swiss theologian and philologist Jakob Christoph Iselin and Antonius Moratori (1727). Johann Heinrich Zedler's huge Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon (“The Great Comprehensive Universal Lexicon”; 1732–50) was in the older tradition but is important for its accuracy and its biographical and bibliographical material. An attempt to produce a German type of the Encyclopédie in 1778–1807 was, however, a failure. Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus (Brockhaus, Friedrich Arnold) recognized the real need of the German people. Reworking Renatus Gotthelf Löbel's bankrupt encyclopaedia, he produced his first Konversations-Lexikon (Konversationslexikon) (1796–1811), thereby setting the pattern for at least half of all succeeding encyclopaedias throughout the western world. Brief, well-designed articles tightly packed with facts, comprehensive coverage, and a reputation for accuracy and up-to-dateness were the ingredients for one of the most successful of encyclopaedias.

The 19th century

      Having served a long apprenticeship as a reviser of Chambers's Cyclopaedia, Abraham Rees at last produced a completely original and finely illustrated work, The New Cyclopaedia (1802–20), the only serious rival to the Britannica in a generation that saw some dozen “new” encyclopaedias rise and fall. What might have been the greatest encyclopaedia of the century, the Encyclopaedia Metropolitana (1817–45), failed miserably because of the early withdrawal of its designer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Coleridge, Samuel Taylor), and subsequent financial troubles; but from it came the most notable contribution to the philosophy of encyclopaedia making since Bacon—Coleridge's profound treatise “On Method” (1818).

      To the principal influences on the compilation of encyclopaedias—Bacon, Diderot, the Britannica, and Brockhaus—must be added that of the Frenchman Pierre Larousse (Larousse, Pierre). His completely original approach to encyclopaedia making has given the series of encyclopaedias that bear his name a unique reputation. Emphasis throughout has been on readability; style has never been sacrificed to conciseness, and the successive editors of Larousse have paid very close attention to the changing public taste among French readers concerning the presentation of information.

      The advent of the work of Noah Webster (Webster, Noah) was fully as epoch-making as that of Brockhaus and Larousse. Webster's informative American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) was encyclopaedic in character, but he avoided the long entries for the more important subjects that were such a feature of Larousse. Webster's approach appealed to the American taste and captured a huge market that has only increased with the years.

      Brockhaus soon faced opposition, for his encyclopaedia was stronger on the humanities than on scientific and technical subjects. Joseph Meyer's Der grosse Conversations-Lexikon (1840–52) rectified this imbalance and was the first of a highly successful series that competed vigorously with Brockhaus for 100 years. In addition, Herder's Conversations-Lexikon (1853–57) and its subsequent editions provided the Catholic counterbalance in a country where Protestants and Catholics were almost equal in numbers.

      The market for encyclopaedias in 19th-century Great Britain seemed inexhaustible, but many publishers lost money by putting out works that failed to capture the public's fancy. An exception was Chambers's Encyclopaedia (1860–68), which was unconnected with Ephraim Chambers's classic. Influenced by childhood access to a copy of the Britannica, Robert Chambers (Chambers, Robert) and his brother William compiled an original work, Chambers's Encyclopaedia, that took the Konversationslexikon form and thus found a new market that has continued to the present day.

      In the first half of the 19th century there was increasing activity in other countries. Poland produced the Encyklopedia Powszechna (1858–68), known as “Orgelbrand” after its publisher. The Hungarians had followed the Bohemian Slovník naučný (“Scientific Dictionary”; 1860–90) with the Egyetemes magyar encyclopaedia (“Universal Hungarian Encyclopaedia”; 1861–76). The Russians (Russia) had produced half an encyclopaedia, V.N. Tatishchev's Leksikon rossyskoy (“Russian lexicon”), in 1793, and then issued A. Starchevsky's Spravochny entsiklopedichesky slovar (“Encyclopaedic Reference Dictionary”; 1847–55) on the Brockhaus model. More important was the famous Entsiklopedichesky slovar (“Encyclopaedic Dictionary”; 1895), which became known as “Granat” after the Granat Russian Bibliographical Institute that produced it. A later edition (1910–48) of “Granat,” in 58 volumes, was not exported from the Soviet Union. Modeled on the Britannica, this edition contained many important articles, such as Lenin's contribution on “Marx” and on “The Russian 19th-Century Agrarian Problem.” Successive ideological changes in Russian society caused many changes in the text of “Granat,” and it long remained one of the most inaccessible of all Russian encyclopaedias outside the Soviet Union.

      Larousse did not go unchallenged. Inspired by the French politician Ferdinand-Camille Dreyfus, La Grande Encyclopédie (1886–1902) provided France with a superb, authoritative, and comprehensive work, well documented, and of excellent scholarship throughout. In Denmark the century ended with the issue of no fewer than three new good multivolume encyclopaedias: Allers (1892–99), Hagerups (1892–1900), and Salmonsens (1893–1911), a situation without parallel in the history of encyclopaedias. During the course of the century practically every feature of the modern encyclopaedia had been introduced, and editorial standards had at times risen to a height that modern editors can only envy.

The 20th century and beyond

      In 1890–1906 a Russian edition of Brockhaus, which subsequently had considerable success, was issued from the St. Petersburg office of Brockhaus. In contrast, S.N. Yushakov designed his Bolshaya entsiklopedya (“Great Encyclopaedia”; 1900–09) on the “Meyer” model. After “Granat” the next important encyclopaedia was the 65-volume Bolshaya sovetskaya entsiklopedya (Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediya) (“Great Soviet Encyclopaedia”; 1926–47), which was eventually discredited; the second edition (1949–58) had a Marxist-Leninist approach but was less biassed on nonpolitical subjects. It represented almost the whole of the Soviet Union's cultural resources: 8,000 scholars contributed articles, and the appended bibliographies were truly international in scope. One complete volume was devoted to the Soviet Union. The yearbooks that supplemented this encyclopaedia were very well produced and maintained the high standards of the original work. From 1970 to 1978 a 30-volume third edition was issued. The reduction in size was accomplished by editing and the use of a smaller typeface. Early reviews indicated that the quality of the work was similar to that of the second edition. From 1973 to 1983 Macmillan released an English translation of the third Russian edition.

      There was also a series of editions of the much smaller Malaya sovetskaya entsiklopedya (“The Little Soviet Encyclopaedia”), first issued in 1928–31.

      In the United States, the first edition of The New International Encyclopaedia was issued in 1902–04 and was subsequently supplemented by yearbooks. The Encyclopedia Americana (Encyclopedia Americana, The), which traced its ancestry to an English-language adaptation (1829–33) of the seventh edition of Brockhaus, took on new strength in 1902 when the editor of Scientific American, Frederick C. Beach, was appointed editor of the Americana. It has enjoyed growing success through its policy of following the continuous revision system, and yearbooks have supplemented it from 1923 onward. In 1950–51 a completely new American work, Collier's Encyclopedia, appeared in 20 volumes, and subsequent editions have been supplemented by yearbooks since 1960. Collier's was noted for its large number of illustrations and maps.

      The “Espasa,” the Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana (Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeoamericana) (1905–33), like the Enciclopedia italiana, eschewed revision in favour of a series of sizable supplements. One complete volume was devoted to Spain and was separately revised and reissued from time to time. A smaller encyclopaedia, the Salvat universal diccionario enciclopédico (first issued in 1907–13), was revised at frequent intervals. Another major Spanish encyclopaedia, the Enciclopedia labor (first issued 1955–60), devoted one volume each to major subject areas, and an index volume provided the key to the total contents. This encyclopaedia was notable for the attention it paid to every Spanish-speaking part of the world.

      One of the most important of all encyclopaedias, the Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere, ed arti (Enciclopedia italiana di scienze, lettere ed arti) (1929–39), was famous for its lavish production, its superb illustrations, and its lengthy, scholarly, and well-documented articles. Even its defense of Fascist ideology was not allowed to impinge on the general impartiality of the text. Supplements were issued after World War II. The postwar Dizionario enciclopedico italiano (1955–61), issued by the same publishers, was a much smaller, well-illustrated work. The Enciclopedia europea was released in Milan between 1976 and 1984. Although consisting largely of brief articles, it had numerous signed long articles of good quality. In Germany the three giants of the German encyclopaedia world—Brockhaus, “Meyer,” “Herder”—continued to produce new editions in the 20th century.

      In spite of the continuing popularity of Larousse, France produced three other encyclopaedias of note in the 20th century. The Encyclopédie française (begun 1935) was an outstanding collection of monographs by well-known scholars and specialists, arranged in classified form and available in loose-leaf binders, supplemented by a continuously revised index. Its 21 volumes, each under the direction of a different authority, dealt with (1) human mental tools (logical thought, language, and mathematics); (2) physics; (3) heaven and earth; (4) life; (5) living beings; (6) human beings (the normal and the sick); (7) the human species; (8) the study of the mind; (9) the economic and social universe; (10) the modern state; (11) international life; (12) chemical science and industry; (13) industry and agriculture; (14) daily life; (15) education and learning theory; (16–17) arts and literatures; (18) the written word; (19) philosophy and religion; and (20) the world in its development (history, evolution, prospective); the 21st volume contained an index. The articles were notable for their almost total concentration on contemporary issues in the fields considered.

      The Encyclopédie de la Pléiade (begun 1955) was an encyclopaedic series, each work (some in more than one volume) being a self-contained treatment of a broad subject field written in narrative form.

      One of the most interesting new encyclopaedias was the Encyclopaedia Universalis (first issued 1968–74), edited by Claude Grégory and owned by the French Book Club and Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. (since 2005 solely by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.). This work, inspired by L'Encyclopédie, eschewed the inclusion of minor items in favour of extensive and very well-illustrated articles on important subjects, and it paid special attention to modern science and technology. It was accompanied by a symposium and an elaborate thesaurus-index.

      Encyclopaedia Universalis was doubly notable as the product of a contemporary publishing phenomenon known in the industry as “coproduction.” The term is applied in general to the collaborative efforts of publishing concerns in two or more countries that have combined forces to produce an encyclopaedia for sale in one of the countries or, with modifications to the volumes, in two or several countries. Successful examples of coproduction in the 20th century include the Buritanika Kokusai Dai Hyakka Jiten (Britannica International Encyclopædia) in Japan and the Concise Encyclopædia Britannica in China (both discussed below). Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., in addition, was similarly involved in the development of the Taiwan edition of the Concise Encyclopædia Britannica in traditional Chinese characters (1989); the Korean Britannica World Encyclopædia; the Turkish AnaBritannica; two Spanish-language encyclopaedias, the Enciclopedia Barsa de consulta fácil and the Enciclopedia hispánica; the Portuguese-language Enciclopédia Barsa and Enciclopédia Mirador Internacional, a scholarly set first published in Brazil in 1975; Il Modulo, published in Italy; Britannica Hungarica Világenciklopédia (2002), published in Budapest; and Britannica Edycja Polska (1997–2005), published in Poznań, Pol. Coproduction was taken worldwide with localized editions of the one-volume Britannica Concise Encyclopedia, first published in English in 2002, based on Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia (2000), itself a coproduction between Britannica and Merriam-Webster, Inc. Within a decade, versions of Britannica Concise augmented with local content were planned in Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Macedonian, Malayalam, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Tamil, Thai, and Vietnamese.

      Other major instances of coproduction involved The New Caxton Encyclopedia, which originated in Italy with Istituto Geografico de Agostini and subsequently appeared in Great Britain, first sold in serial parts as Purnell's New English Encyclopedia (1966) and then in a bound set of 18 volumes (1966); in France there appeared a version called Alpha: La Grande Encyclopédie Universelle en Couleurs, and in Spain a version called Monitor. The American-made The Random House Encyclopedia was adapted and translated in various languages and under various names for distribution in several countries.

      By the 21st century virtually every Western country had domestically produced or released either a single-volume or a multivolume encyclopaedia in its native tongue. Many encyclopaedias were available additionally, and some solely, in CD-ROM, DVD, and online formats.

Encyclopaedias in the East

China

      The contribution from the East to the history of encyclopaedias is distinctive and covers a longer period than that of the West. The Chinese have produced encyclopaedias for approximately 2,000 years, but traditionally they differ from the modern Western encyclopaedia in that they are mainly anthologies of significant literature with some elements of the dictionary. Compiled by scholars of eminence, they have been revised rather than replaced over hundreds of years. In the main, they followed a classified form of arrangement; very often their chief use was to aid candidates for the civil service. The first known Chinese encyclopaedia, the Huanglan (“Imperial Anthology”), was prepared by order of the emperor about AD 220. No part of this work has survived. Part of the Bianzhu (“Stringed Pearls of Literature”), prepared about 600, is still extant. About 620 the Yiwen leiju (“Anthology of Art and Literature”) was prepared by Ouyang Xun (557–641) in 100 chapters divided into 47 sections. The Beitang shuchao (“Extracts for Books”) of Yu Shinan (558–638) was more substantial and paid particular attention to details of the organization of public administration. An annotated edition, edited by Kong Guangdao, was published in 1880.

      The Chuxueji (“Entry into Learning”) was a modest work compiled about 700 by Xujian (659–729) and his colleagues. A more important book was the Tongdian (“Comprehensive Statutes”) compiled by Du Yu (735–812), a writer on government and economics. Completed about 801, it contained nine sections: economics, examinations and degrees, government, rites and ceremonies, music, the army, law, political geography, national defense. In 1273 it was supplemented by Ma Duanlin's enormous and highly regarded Wenxian tongkao (“General Study of the Literary Remains”), which included a good bibliography. Supplements to this work were published in the 17th, 18th, and 20th centuries. Under the order of the second Song emperor, Song Taizong, the statesman Li Fang organized the compilation of the vast Taiping yulan (“Imperially Inspected Anthology of the Taiping Era”; see ), which included extracts from many works of literary and scientific standing that are no longer extant. In 1568–72 the Taiping yulan was revised and reprinted from movable type; a new edition revised by Yuanyuan appeared in 1812. The Cefu yuangui (c. 1013), particularly strong in historical and biographical subjects, was almost as large as the Taiping yulan.

      The historian Zheng Qiao (1108–66) compiled the Tongzhi (“General Treatises”), an original work with a strong personal contribution; the printed edition (1747) was in 118 volumes. One of the richest and most important of all Chinese encyclopaedias, the Yuhai (“Sea of Jade”), was compiled about 1267 by the renowned Song scholar Wang Yinglin (1223–92) and was reprinted in 240 volumes in 1738.

      What was probably the largest encyclopaedia ever compiled, the Yongle dadian (“The Great Canon of the Yongle Era”), was issued at the beginning of the 15th century. Unfortunately, only a very small part of its 22,937 chapters has survived; these were published in 1963. A number of small encyclopaedias were issued in the 16th century, but the next important event was the publication of the small but profusely illustrated Sancai tuhui (1607–09), compiled by Wang Qi and his son Wang Siyi. In 1704–11 the Chinese literary encyclopaedia Peiwen yunfu was compiled by order of the emperor Kangxi; this was supplemented by the Yunfu shiyi (1720). Other works ordered by the emperor include the Bianzi leibian (1726) and the Zishi jinghua (1727). In 1726 the huge Gujin tushu jicheng (“Collection of Pictures and Writings”) was published by order of the emperor. Edited by the scholar Chen Menglei, it filled more than 750,000 pages and attempted to embody the whole of the Chinese cultural heritage.

      At the turn of the century, a number of encyclopaedias were issued. Wang Qi's Shiwu yuanhui, which covered well over 2,000 topics, was compiled in 1796. Lu Fengzuo's Xiaozhilu (1804) is particularly valuable for its attention to technical terms, which previous works had ignored. Chen Wei's Jingzhuan II (1804) concentrated on history and the great Chinese classics, whereas Wang Chenglie's Qiming jishu (1806) is stronger in biographical material. Dai Zhaochun compiled the Sishu wujing leidian jicheng (1887), a historical work for the use of civil-service candidates. Wei Song's Yishi jishi (1888) had actually been compiled 65 years previously, but it paid far more attention to practical matters. The Jiutongtong (1902) of Liu Keyi was in large measure a reassembly of material in the older encyclopaedias in a more efficient classification. A more important work of the period is the largely historical and biographical Ershisishi jiu tong zhengdian leiyao hebian (1902). The Qingchao xu wenxian tongkao (1905), compiled by Liu Jinzao, was revised and enlarged in 400 volumes in 1921. It includes contemporary material on fiscal, administrative, and industrial affairs and gives some attention to technical matters. Lu Erkui's Ciyuan (1915), with a supplement issued in 1931, was the first really modern Chinese encyclopaedia and set the style for nearly all later works of this nature.

      In 1980, officials of the Greater Encyclopedia of China Publishing House and Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., announced an agreement under which the Micropædia of the 15th edition of Encyclopædia Britannica would be translated into Chinese for distribution in China. The 10-volume set for this project, The Concise Encyclopædia Britannica, was published serially in 1985–86. A 20-volume revised edition, Encyclopædia Britannica International Chinese Edition, was published in 1999 and substantially revised in 2007.

Japan

      In the Edo, or Tokugawa (Tokugawa period), era (1603–1867) there appeared a kind of encyclopaedia that consisted of extracts of major works in Japanese and Chinese. Kojiruien (51 volumes, 1879–1914) and Nihon-hyakka-daijiten, or the “Great Japanese Encyclopaedia” (10 volumes, 1908–19) were somewhat more akin to modern encyclopaedias but were mostly compilations of scientific works. More complete general encyclopaedias appeared in the Showa period (1926–89); Dai-hyakka (28 volumes, 1931–35), Kokumin-hyakka (15 volumes, 1934–37), Sekai-daihyakka (24 volumes, 1955–68), and Japonica (19 volumes, 1967–72) are examples of well-compiled works. The Buritanika Kokusai Dai Hyakka Jiten (Buritanika Kokusai Daihyakka-jiten), or Britannica International Encyclopædia (29 volumes), which began publication in 1972 and was completed in 1975, was the joint creation of Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., and the Tokyo Broadcasting System acting together as TBS/Britannica Company, Tokyo. Unlike most Japanese-language encyclopaedias, which consisted largely of simple short entries, its main body consisted of 20 volumes of lengthy systematic entries (the main body was fully revised in 1988). Other sections of the four-part set included a six-volume reference guide, consisting of many thousands of short factual entries; a reader's guide; a study guide; and an index. There were also supplemental yearbooks. After 2006 the encyclopaedia was available solely in electronic form, as Encyclopædia Britannica Online Japan.

The Arab world

      The early encyclopaedias written in Arabic (Arabic literature) can be roughly divided into two classes: those designed for people who wished to be well informed and to make full use of their cultural heritage, and those for the rapidly growing number of official administrators. The latter type of encyclopaedia originated when the Arabs established their rule through so many parts of the Mediterranean region. The first true encyclopaedia was the work of Ibn Qutaybah (828–889), a teacher and philologist, who dealt with his topics by quoting traditional aphorisms, historical examples, and old Arabic poems. The arrangement and contents of his Kitāb ʿuyūn al-akhbār (“The Book of Choice Narratives”) set the pattern for many later encyclopaedias. The 10 books were arranged in the following order: power, war, nobility, character, learning and eloquence, asceticism, friendship, prayers, food, women. Ibn ʿAbd Rabbih of Córdoba improved on Ibn Qutaybah's work in his ʿIqd al-farīd (“The Precious Necklace”) by including more contemporary items of note.

      What has often mistakenly been referred to as the first encyclopaedia, the Mafātīḥ al-ʿUlūm (“Keys to the Sciences”), was compiled in 975–997 by the Persian scholar and statesman al-Khwārizmī, who was well aware of the content of the more important Greek writings. He divided his work into two sections: indigenous knowledge (jurisprudence, scholastic philosophy, grammar, secretarial duties, prosody and poetic art, history) and foreign knowledge (philosophy, logic, medicine, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, mechanics, alchemy). The Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ (Ikhwān aṣ-Ṣafāʾ) (“Brethren of Purity”), a religious or political party founded at Al-Baṣrah in the 10th century, published the Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ wa khillān al-wafāʾ (“Epistles of the Brethren of Purity and Loyal Friends”), a remarkable work that consisted of 52 pamphlets written by five authors, comprising all the knowledge available in their milieu. The work included (1) mathematics, geography, music, logic, and ethics; (2) the natural sciences and philosophy; (3) metaphysics; and (4) religion, astrology, and magic. A complete edition was published in 1887–89.

      The Egyptian historian and civil servant al-Nuwayrī (1272–1332) compiled one of the best-known encyclopaedias of the Mamlūk period, the Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab (“The Aim of the Intelligent in the Art of Letters”), a work of almost 9,000 pages. It comprised: (1) geography, astronomy, meteorology, chronology, geology; (2) man (anatomy, folklore, conduct, politics); (3) zoology; (4) botany; (5) history. A complete edition was issued in 1923. The Masālik al-abṣār fī mamālik al-amṣār (“Paths of Discernment in the Realms of the Great Cities”) of al-ʿUmarī (Umarī, al-ʿ) (1301–48) was chiefly strong on history, geography, and poetry. A third Egyptian, al-Qalqashandī (1355/56–1418), compiled a more important and well-organized encyclopaedia, Ṣubḥ al-aʿshā (“The Dawn for the Blind”), that covered geography, political history, natural history, zoology, mineralogy, cosmography, and time measurement. Al-Ibshīhī (1388–c. 1446) compiled a very individual encyclopaedia, the Mustaṭraf fī kull fann mustaẓraf (“A Quest for Attainment in Each Fine Art”), that covered the Islamic religion, conduct, law, spiritual qualities, work, natural history, music, food, and medicine. At the turn of the Arab fortunes, al-Ibshīhī had recapitulated all that was best in their culture.

      The Persian jurist Dawānī (1427–1502/03) published a kind of encyclopaedia, entitled Unmūdhaj al-ʿulūm (“Program of the Sciences”), that consisted of documented questions and answers and technical inventions on a very wide range of subjects. Al-Shīrazī (died 1542) soon issued a refutation to it, the Maqālat al-radd ʿalā unmūdag ʿalā unmūdhaj al-ʿulūm al-jalāliyyah (“Treatise on the Refutation of Jalāl [al-Dīn Dawānī's] Unmūdhaj al-ʿulūm”). The Majmaʿ multaqā al-zuhūr bī rawḍah min al-manẓūm wa al manthūr (1524; “Collection of Tangled Flowers in the Garden of Poetry and Prose”) of al-Ḥanafī comprised an encyclopaedic survey and description of the various branches of knowledge, with an appendix containing an alphabetical list of the names of God. In Lebanon, Buṭrus al-Bustānī (Bustānī, Buṭrus al-) and his sons compiled the Dāʾirat al-maʿārif (1876–1900; “The Circle of Knowledge”). A second edition (1923–25) was prepared by Muḥammad Farīd Wajdī, and a third edition was begun by Fuʾād Afrām al-Bustānī in 1956. Arabic encyclopaedias, both general and topical, were widely available by the start of the 21st century.

Robert L. Collison Warren E. Preece Ed.

Additional Reading

General works

Walford's Guide to Reference Material, 5th ed., vol. 3 (1991); and Eugene P. Sheehy et al., (eds.), Guide to Reference Books, 10th ed. (1986), and their supplements, both provide histories and scholarly evaluations of the principal current English- and foreign-language encyclopaedias. American Reference Books Annual, a reviewing service for reference books published in the United States, regularly includes overviews of encyclopaedias. Gert A. Zischka, Index Lexicorum: Bibliographie der Lexikalischen Nachschlagewerke (1959), is important both for its excellent summary of the history of the encyclopaedia and for its extensive bibliography of encyclopaedias. Frances Neel Cheney and Wiley J. Williams, Fundamental Reference Sources, 2nd ed. (1980), includes discussions of good encyclopaedias. Annie M. Brewer, Dictionaries, Encyclopedias, and Other Word-Related Books, 4th ed., 2 vol. (1988), is a classified catalog of about 38,000 dictionaries, encyclopaedias, and similar works in English and all other languages. Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference: Lexicography, Learning, and Language from the Clay Tablet to the Computer (1986), is a readable history of reference book publishing. James Rettig (ed.), Distinguished Classics of Reference Publishing (1992), contains essays on the history and use of 32 reference books, including many mentioned in the article above.

History and philosophy

There are two short and very readable introductions to the subject: Library of Congress, The Circle of Knowledge (1979), a well-illustrated guide issued in connection with a Library of Congress exhibition; and Sigfrid H. Steinberg, “Encyclopaedias,” Signature, New Series, 12:3–22 (1951), a brilliant conspectus of the whole field of encyclopaedia history. Robert Collison, Encyclopaedias: Their History Throughout the Ages, 2nd ed. (1966), lists and describes in one chronological sequence encyclopaedias from both East and West, and pays particular attention to L'Encyclopédie, Brockhaus, the Britannica, the Metropolitana, and Larousse; it also includes a reprint of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Treatise on Method,” a philosophical essay on the design of encyclopaedias. Fritz Saxl, “Illustrated Mediaeval Encyclopaedias,” in his Lectures, vol. 1, pp. 228–254, and vol. 2, plates 155–174 (1957, reissued 1978), is an important and original contribution to the subject, the 20 illustrations being especially interesting. The Journal of World History, vol. 9, no. 3 (1966), is a complete issue devoted to an international symposium on encyclopaedias, special attention being paid to St. Isidore, Hugh of Saint-Victor, Raoul Ardent, Vincent of Beauvais, Sahagún, L'Encyclopédie, the Metropolitana, the Britannica, L'Encyclopédie française, and Arabic and Chinese encyclopaedias of the classical period. “The Uses of Encyclopaedias: Past, Present, and Future,” American Behavioral Scientist, 6:3–40 (1962), is a stimulating symposium with contributions by Livio C. Stecchini, Jacques Barzun, Harry S. Ashmore, W.T. Couch, Charles Van Doren, Francis X. Sutton, David L. Sills, Carl F. Stover, and Alfred de Grazia. Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment: A Publishing History of the Encyclopédie, 1775–1800 (1979), traces the history of Diderot's great encyclopaedia. Herman Kogan, The Great EB (1958), is a well-written and fascinating account of the Britannica and its history, but it is also valuable for the light it throws on the more practical problems and techniques of the encyclopaedia world in general. S. Padraig Walsh, Anglo-American General Encyclopedias (1968), is a historical bibliography of English-language encyclopaedias issued during the period 1703–1967. In each encyclopaedia the entry under the word “Encyclopaedia” or “Encyclopedia” will usually (but not invariably) provide information concerning that encyclopaedia's own history and often gives very useful information on the history of encyclopaedias in general. Additional details may often be found in an encyclopaedia's general introduction, which is usually printed in the first volume.

Evaluative studies

American Library Association, Reference Books Bulletin Editorial Board, Purchasing an Encyclopedia, 4th ed. (1992), is a pamphlet suggesting 12 criteria for evaluating the quality and usefulness of any encyclopaedia and contains the Board's recommendations concerning a number of major English-language encyclopaedias for adults and children; the Board's annual review of these encyclopaedias using the 12 criteria are published in Booklist, usually in September or October. Kenneth F. Kister, Kister's Best Encyclopedias, 2nd ed. (1994), is a comprehensive consumer guide to general and specialized subject encyclopaedias in the English language, as well as an annotated list of major foreign-language encyclopaedias.

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