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Encyclopedias and dictionaries, French --- Encyclopedias and dictionaries --- Enlightenment --- History and criticism. --- History --- Maurists --- Benedictines --- Intellectual life. --- Maurists' Universal Dictionary of Arts, Crafts and Sciences --- Encyclopédie --- Dictionnaire de Trévoux --- History. --- France --- Intellectual life

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In 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. In 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 Encyclopédie. 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 Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert. Holmberg 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 Encyclopédie and the Jesuits' Dictionnaire de Trévoux, the author highlights striking similarities between the Benedictine project and that of Diderot and D'Alembert, showing that the philosophes were neither first with their encyclopedic innovations, nor alone in their secular Enlightenment endeavours.--

Encyclopedias and dictionaries, French --- Learning and scholarship --- Encyclopédies et dictionnaires français --- Savoir et érudition --- History and criticism. --- Religious aspects --- Catholic Church --- Histoire et critique --- Aspect religieux --- Eglise catholique --- Maurists --- France --- Intellectual life --- Vie intellectuelle --- Encyclopédies et dictionnaires français --- Savoir et érudition --- Lexicology. Semantics --- History of France --- Congregation of Saint-Maur [O.S.B.] --- anno 1700-1799 --- Catholic Church. --- Encyclopedias and dictionaries --- Enlightenment --- History and criticism --- History --- Benedictines --- Maurists' Universal Dictionary of Arts, Crafts and Sciences --- Encyclopédie --- Dictionnaire de Trévoux --- Congregation of Saint Maur --- Encyclopedias and dictionaries, French - History and criticism --- Encyclopedias and dictionaries - France - History - 18th century --- Enlightenment - France - Encyclopedias --- Bénédictins --- Saint-Maur --- France - Intellectual life - 18th century