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 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, 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, 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 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’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 (the younger brother of the playwright Pierre Corneille) 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 that an encyclopaedia he projected was to have included comprehensive specialist articles by the lexicographer Samuel Johnson, the statesman Edmund Burke, the portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds, the historian Edward Gibbon, the economist Adam Smith, 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, Colin Macfarquhar, and William Smellie, 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 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 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 (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 was developing his dictionary’s reputation for reliability.

Children’s encyclopaedias

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, 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. 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 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: 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 was not impartial. His finest encyclopaedia, the Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe 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, 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 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 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 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’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 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’s Encyclopédie chimique (“Chemical Encyclopaedia”) appeared in 1882–99, and A Dictionary of Applied Chemistry, edited by Sir Thomas Edward Thorpe, 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’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 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, 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 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 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’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 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, 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 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, 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.

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 information, began publication in 1864. In 1868 the English publisher Joseph Whitaker first issued his Whitaker’s Almanack, 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 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 in the field of information storage, retrieval, and distribution. 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 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 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, 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 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

In 2001 the English-language version of Wikipedia was launched. A free, Internet-based encyclopaedia operating under an 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.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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 bce), 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, 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 bce), a series of letters (now lost) written by the Roman consul Marcus Porcius Cato (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 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 (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—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.

The development of the encyclopaedia during the next 500 years, 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 (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 (c. 1220–95), the master of Dante, and the Florentine poet and philosopher Guido Cavalcanti. 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, 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’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’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 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, 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’s Cyclopaedia (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 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 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 recognized the real need of the German people. Reworking Renatus Gotthelf Löbel’s bankrupt encyclopaedia, he produced his first Konversations-Lexikon (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, 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. 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 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 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.

Beyond Webster’s work, a wide variety of encyclopaedias appeared in the United States during the 19th century, ranging from reprints of British encyclopaedias to homegrown works such as The New American Cyclopaedia (1858–63) and The People’s Cyclopedia of Universal Knowledge (1881). Perhaps as many as two dozen encyclopaedias were available to American readers. The Britannica was among them, and its ninth edition (1875–89) was much republished in authorized and pirated forms.

In the first half of the 19th century there was increasing activity in other countries too. 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 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 (“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, 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 (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 (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 Researcher’s Note: Taiping yulan), 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, 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, 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 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 (“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 (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 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 The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica