The European Encyclopedia: From 1650 to the Twenty-First Century, by Jeff Loveland (Book review)

Abstract

In Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693), John Locke insisted that the example of good behaviour imparted by a polite tutor to a young gentleman was more important ‘than all the hard Words, or real Knowledge he has got from the Liberal Arts, or his Tutor’s learned Encyclopaidia’. Despite the existence of Johann Heinrich Alsted’s Latin Encyclopaedia (1630), it is unlikely that Locke was referring to a printed book. In the late 1600s, the term ‘encyclopaedia’ still denoted the pathway through the liberal arts and sciences, as attained by selective reading, study and conversation. The source of this idea was the Greek concept of enkyklios paideia, as interpreted by the Romans. In this impressively researched book, Jeff Loveland considers the period in which ‘encyclopaedia’ came instead to denote a multi-volume ‘alphabetical book of knowledge’ covering a wider range of subjects (p. 1). The main specimen-types in Europe were the Encyclopédie (from 1751), the Encyclopaedia Britannica (from 1771) and the German Konversations-Lexikon published by the Brockhaus family from the early 1800s.