{"product_id":"9780729411912-maurists-unfinished-encyclopedia","title":"The Maurists' Unfinished Encyclopedia","description":"\u003cmeta content=\"text\/html; charset=utf-8\" http-equiv=\"Content-Type\"\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eAn analysis of recently discovered 18th-century encyclopedia, its genesis and content.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn this groundbreaking study, Linn Holmberg provides new perspectives on the Enlightenment ‘dictionary wars’ and offers a fascinating insight into the intellectual reorientation of a monastic community in the Age of Reason.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn mid-eighteenth-century Paris, two Benedictine monks from the Congregation of Saint-Maur – also known as the Maurists – began working on a universal dictionary of arts, crafts, and sciences. At the same time, Diderot and D’Alembert started to compile the famous \u003cem\u003eEncyclopédie\u003c\/em\u003e. The Benedictines, however, never finished or published their work and the manuscripts were left, forgotten, in the monastery archive. In the first study devoted to the Maurists’ unfinished encyclopedia, Holmberg explores the project’s origins, development, and abandonment and sheds new light on the intellectual activities of its creators, the emergence of the encyclopedic dictionary in France, and the \u003cem\u003eEncyclopédie\u003c\/em\u003e of Diderot and D’Alembert.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHolmberg adopts a multidisciplinary approach to the challenges of studying a hitherto unexplored and incomplete manuscript. By using codicology and handwriting analysis, the author reconstructs the drafts’ order of production, estimates the number of compilers and the nature of their work, and detects comprehensive editorial interferences made by nineteenth-century conservators at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Holmberg’s meticulous work proves, with textual evidence, the Maurist dictionary’s origins as an augmented translation of a mathematical dictionary by Christian Wolff. Through comparing the Maurists’ manuscripts to the \u003cem\u003eEncyclopédie\u003c\/em\u003e and the Jesuits’ \u003cem\u003eDictionnaire de Trévoux\u003c\/em\u003e, the author highlights striking similarities between the Benedictine project and that of Diderot and D’Alembert, showing that the \u003cem\u003ephilosophes\u003c\/em\u003e were neither first with their encyclopedic innovations, nor alone in their secular Enlightenment endeavours.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Rarewaves","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40701056450657,"sku":"9780729411912","price":129.67,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0092\/7504\/8033\/files\/orig_29865152.jpg?v=1725801853","url":"https:\/\/www.rarewaves.com\/products\/9780729411912-maurists-unfinished-encyclopedia","provider":"Rarewaves.com","version":"1.0","type":"link"}