Overview

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the number of specialized dictionaries and encyclopedias grew from a trickle to a flood, while the number of disciplines they were devoted to grew from a handful to dozens, representing many varieties of knowledge. Specialized dictionaries – as most were called, whether lexical or encyclopedic – were far more numerous than general encyclopedias. Yet despite their importance – as sources of knowledge, for example, and as definers of disciplines – they have not been much studied. Drawing on Frank Kafker’s methods for studying the period’s general encyclopedias, as pioneered in Notable Encyclopedias of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1981), this volume examines specialized dictionaries as commercial products, collections of content, and cultural artifacts. Specifically, it complements a wide-ranging, analytical introduction sketching out the characteristics of specialized dictionaries in general with a series of individually authored but standardized case studies. The latter deal with dictionaries on a variety of disciplines, from the Bible to mining, and in five European languages. The volume concludes with an essay on Frank Kafker’s influence on historiography.

Full Product Details

9781837641468

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Jeff Loveland is a Visiting Assistant Professor of History at Utah Tech University. Much of his research concerns the history of encyclopedias, especially eighteenth-century European encyclopedias. His publications include The Early Britannica (1768-1803) (2009, co-edited with Frank A. Kafker) and The European Encyclopedia, from 1650 to the Twenty-First Century (2019). Stéphane Schmitt is a research director at the Archives Henri Poincaré (French Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) in Nancy, France. He works on the history of the life sciences, especially in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. He has published many books and papers on the history of anatomy, embryology, and zoology, and is the main editor of Buffon’s Œuvres completes (2007-, 17 volumes published to date).

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available