I see that I haven’t posted anything from The Western Humanities (a textbook I can’t bear to part with) since September, when I shared Charlotte Bronte’s observations on the first World’s Fair.
Today the section on the Enlightenment caught my eye, so I made a list of eight facts about Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedie.
(I’m very sorry that I can’t figure out accents on WordPress!)
Did you know all this?
- According to The Western Humanities, the Encyclopedie is “the summation of the Enlightenment… a summary of the existing knowledge in the arts, crafts, and sciences.”
2. It followed in the footsteps of Bayle’s Dictionary (France, 1697) and Chambers’s Cyclopedia (England, 1728).
3. The articles were written by 161 people; the Encyclopedie was edited by Denis Diderot.
4. It was written between 1750 and 1772.
5. A state censor halted the project in 1759 because of its controversial content (Diderot said he wanted “to change the general way of thinking”), but publication continued secretly.
6. The Encyclopedie was funded by it’ readers, rather than the government or the church.
7. The original Encyclopedie consisted of seventeen volumes of text and eleven books of plates and illustrations.
8. “Private circulating libraries rented the volumes to untold numbers of customers.”
Since The Western Humanities is a textbook, it only includes one column on Diderot’s Encyclopedie, but I still learned a few things, especially that the Encyclopedie was a huge undertaking.