Encyclopaedic Visions Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture [Paperback]

Cultural history of Enlightenment encyclopaedias revealing Enlightenment debates concerning organisation and communication of knowledge.The eighteenth century English dictionaries of arts and sciences claimed to contain all knowledge that a person of education should possess. Richard Yeo places these scientific dictionaries in a rich cultural framework of debate that includes the arrangement of knowledge, the Republic of Letters, the Enlightenment public sphere, copyright issues, and the specialisation of science. He examines assumptions about the organisation, communication, and control of knowledge in these works. Elegantly illustrated and comprehensively written, Encyclopaedic Visions provides a major contribution to Enlightenment studies and the history of ideas in general.The eighteenth century English dictionaries of arts and sciences claimed to contain all knowledge that a person of education should possess. Richard Yeo places these scientific dictionaries in a rich cultural framework of debate that includes the arrangement of knowledge, the Republic of Letters, the Enlightenment public sphere, copyright issues, and the specialisation of science. He examines assumptions about the organisation, communication, and control of knowledge in these works. Elegantly illustrated and comprehensively written, Encyclopaedic Visions provides a major contribution to Enlightenment studies and the history of ideas in general.The eighteenth-century English dictionaries of arts and sciences claimed to contain all knowledge that a person of education should possess. Richard Yeo places these scientific dictionaries in a rich cultural framework of debate that includes the classification of knowledge, the tradition of commonplaces, the Republic of Letters, the Enlightenment public sphere, copyright issues, and the specialization of science. He examines assumptions about the organization, communication, and control of knowledge in these works. Elegantly illustrated and clearly writlS¨