Encyclopaedias as during and since the Enlightenment
Presented by Prof. Richard Yeo
April 4, 2006
Encyclopaedias are certainly tools for the historian of science. But can they be said to be tools of scientific research? Possibly not, at least not since the professionalization and more intense specialization of science from the mid-19th century. Yet when encyclopaedias emerged during the Enlightenment, there was a strong connection between the wide communication knowledge and further discoveries. I look at the place of the sciences in some major encyclopaedias; and conclude by considering whether the idea of the 'encyclopaedia' is about to be lost.
Richard Yeo is an Australian Professorial Fellow in the Centre for Public Culture and Ideas, Faculty of Arts, Griffith University, Brisbane. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. His research is in the history of science and history of ideas.
His books include Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 1993); Encyclopaedic Visions: Scientific Dictionaries and Enlightenment Culture (Cambridge, 2001); and Science in the Public Sphere: Natural Knowledge in British Culture, 1800-1860 (Ashgate, 2001). He coedited (with Michael Shortland) Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (Cambridge, 1996). |
