University of Heidelberg

This project is in its start-up-phase, and during this time it aims at two things: Firstly, there is understanding the genre of encyclopaedic works in Europe and Asia. And secondly it wants to track the flow of encyclopaedic knowledge between Europe and Asia, in particular India, China and Japan. This is a reproduction of the frontispiece of the Encyclopédie by Diderot et D'Alembert.
The pages on this website want to help define the genre of encyclopaedia as a general phenomenon of human civilization. It is the basic view of the members of this project that the existence of an encyclopaedia is not predicated on the European development and that thus some books should be seen as encyclopaedias, whose creation was independent of the Enlightenment which proved so important for European encyclopaedic works. Even within the European tradition, encyclopaedic works predate the Enlightenment by centuries. So the common notion that encyclopaedias and the era Enlightenment are necessarily intertwined is only correct for the European form of encyclopaedic works from the Encyclopédie by Diderot et D'Alembert to the Conversationslexika from the middle of the 19th century on. This form of the encyclopaedia is closely connected to the development of an open sphere and of public opinion. Therefore, it is not surprising that in Western historiography, the introduction of the encyclopaedic form is usually connected to the spread of the French enlightenment in the 18th and to nation building and development of the urban bourgeoisie in the 19th century. The problem is that this approach (a) tells the story of a European idea, (b) understands the collection of general knowledge as civil opposition against governmental knowledge control and (c) limits the history of Asian encyclopaedias to translation and adaptation of Western encyclopaedia.In order to overcome a European-focussed understanding of encyclopaedia we need to develop a method for dealing with the empirical evidence of how encyclopaedic texts and ordering principles migrate and how they are culturally translated. Obstacles to overcome are: (a) a research environment where source material is limited to national encyclopaedia without evidence of the circumstances of their development and without consideration of their use, (b) the idea of the encyclopaedia as an original text without considering the introduction of migrating modules and visual elements.

The project takes different approaches to achieve this end:

1. By discussing the characteristics of the genre (Program D11), we have come to the preliminary conclusion that encyclopaedias are understood as a way of handling and presenting knowledge. The texts discussing this are to be found on this page.

2. By providing bibliographic descriptions (Program D11) of books considered general or specialized encyclopaedias in a given culture. 


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