The work remains one of the largest European encyclopaedias ever produced. Just the title deserves a shelf to itself: The Great Complete Encyclopedia of All Sciences and Arts Which So Far Have Been Invented and Improved by Human Mind and Wit: Including the Geographical and Political Description of the Whole World with All Monarchies, Empires, Kingdoms, Principalities, Republics, Free Sovereignties, Countries, Towns, Sea Harbours, Fortresses, Castles, Areas, Authorities, Monasteries, Mountains, Passes, Woods, Seas, Lakes … and also a Detailed Historical and Genealogical Description of the World’s Brightest and Most Famous Family Lines, the Life and Deeds of the Emperors, Kings, Electors and Princes, Great Heroes, Ministers of State, War Leaders …; Equally about All Policies of State, War and Law and Budgetary Business of the Nobility and the Bourgeois, Merchants, Traders and Arts.*
Unusually for an encyclopaedia, it would carry biographical entries for living people (there were almost fifty entries for the name Wagner). And there would be a spectacular amount of idiosyncrasies and prejudices. Mermaids, for instance, were still a decidedly genuine thing. The Bible was hard fact. The reading of novels was regarded as harmful to the young. The entry on women was entitled Frauenzimmer – a term archaically describing a wench, and later the contents of a woman’s room – explained, with the weight of a news bulletin, that women have achieved remarkable things in the arts and sciences, sometimes equalling the accomplishments of men.
The articles were either surprisingly short or unpredictably long. Leipzig, where the encyclopaedia was based, and where Dr Franckenstein was a law professor, received 155 columns, whereas Berlin got two. Shakespeare received less than a column (there were two columns per page), while J.S. Bach, alive at the time, received no mention at all in the original publication, and got less than a column in a supplemental volume, despite being heralded as a composer of ‘undying fame’. In contrast, the philosopher Christian Wolff (1679–1754) a leading figure of the German Enlightenment, was granted an astonishing 175 pages (while Plato only merited eight). Why the anomaly? One of the editors to succeed Franckenstein, Carl Günther Ludovici, was a leading Wolff scholar, and it may be assumed he just couldn’t help himself.*
We may revel in many other enthusiasms. Ananas, for example, the exotic pineapple, was one of the best things in the world. It was a ‘thoroughly delightful American fruit’, with an ‘excellent taste’ and ‘pleasant smell’; it had medicinal qualities too, boosting fertility and vitality, relieving nausea, ameliorating gout and arthritis, easing the passage of kidney stones. It even helped with ‘insanity’.
The authors Peter E. Carels and Dan Flory have observed that the medical entries were also peculiar in their detail. A surgeon inadequately trained in hand amputation, for example, could consult the encyclopaedia for the right tools for the job, and learn where their assistants should stand in relation to the patient, and discover the precise amount of time of sawing required for the bones of the lower arm (about the same as it takes to read the Lord’s Prayer). The process of conducting a mastectomy was described in a similar step-by-step style. There was also peculiarly naive advice on physical etiquette, including an earnest entry on how to manage the need to urinate or fart during a social gathering (the key was patience and suppression).*
We may recoil from some of the other excesses. ‘Juden’ traces a history of Judaism from biblical days, claiming that God rejected the faith after the crucifixion. The Universal-Lexicon was fearful of anything contradicting the Lutheran church. Jews were deceitful and treacherous, and ‘our sworn enemy’; redemption was only possible through conversion.
If we accept that such a comprehensive storehouse of knowledge and opinion was representative of more than just a succession of opinionated editors – and certainly this is what the Universal-Lexicon became as it claimed its authoritative two yards among the libraries of Europe – then mid-eighteenth century Germany appeared poised between two worlds. It was a relatively peaceful time, a period as yet unshaken by political or industrial revolution. The Age of Enlightenment was an attractive proposition to a cadre of leading writers and philosophers consistently pegged back by the Church and State. Their encyclopaedia provides a fascinating panorama of human comprehension and opinion, and in this alone it shared much with the Encyclopédie.
But we would have to wait almost thirty years, and look once again to Scotland, for the next great step towards the next great encyclopaedia of the modern world.
* As it turned out, the actual text of the Encyclopédie differed substantially from that outlined in its preliminary tree of knowledge. The tree now appears to be more of an idealised vision than a battle plan.
* Diderot (New York, Oxford University Press, 1957). Smallclothes were knee britches.
* While this was an enormous enterprise, weighing in at an estimated 40 tons, it was still only about one-twelfth of the size of the Chinese Yongle Dadian.
* Translated from Denis Diderot Oeuvres Complètes, edited by Jules Assézat and Maurice Turneaux in twenty volumes (Paris, 1875–77).
* The Encyclopedists as Individuals by Frank A. Kafker in collaboration with Serena L. Kafker, Voltaire Foundation at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, 1988. Much of my own summation of the contributors to the Encyclopédie comes from this fascinating book.
* Both D’Alembert and Diderot acknowledged a significant philosophical debt to Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning; specifically, their taxonomy of knowledge ‘tree’ in the preface was directly inspired by the pull-out ‘Analysis’ in that volume. D’Alembert credited Bacon as an inspiration who had ‘silently in the shadows, prepared from afar the light which gradually, by imperceptible degrees, would illuminate the world’. The entry in Encyclopédie by Abbé Jean Pestre entitled ‘Baconisme’ referred to Bacon as a ‘grande génie’.
* The details are vague, but it appears that Le Breton and his fellow publishers sent a conciliatory party to London to halt publication by offering cut-price editions of their own. This would logically suggest advanced levels of French literacy among English readers.
* A very limited number of biographies appeared only as brief mentions within descriptions of a subject’s birthplace.
* A modern searchable translation to English is still under way. The Encyclopedia of Diderot & D’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project (Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2020). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/d/did/
* In one sense, of course, the study of the past is all opinion, and new learning and modern interpretations may counter much of what has gone before. Voltaire acknowledged as much when he claimed in his entry on History that ‘There is the history of opinions, which is hardly other than the collection of human errors.’
* This entry is popularly attributed to Voltaire, though its authorship is unconfirmed.
* Nicolas-Edme Roret’s richly illustrated multi-volume set specialising in natural history was published in Paris in the first half of the nineteenth century. After his death in 1860, Roret’s name continued to appear on a large range of ‘encyclopaedic manuals’ including watchmaking, chocolate manufacture and dance.