Alsted and Bisterfeld, Hartlib and Comenius, Welsch and Leibniz all proposed to emend the Encyclopaedia of 1630, and all failed. Contemplating the failure of these attempts opens up the broadest vista attained by this study. The idea of an ‘enkyklios paideia’, a cycle or circle of instruction or education, is an ancient one which gradually took literary shape during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Three successive generations of reform—led by Agricola, Ramus, and Keckermann—and a fourth generation of collective effort by a whole community generated the most perfect literary manifestation of this idea in Alsted’s Encyclopaedia (section 11.i). For at least two generations after its appearance in 1630, scholars across Europe acknowledged the Encyclopaedia as the leading work of its kind and sought to revise or replace it. During this lengthy period, the connotations of the term ‘encyclopaedia’ shifted from designating a ‘cycle of studies’ to a genre of books which sought to summarize the circle of learning in print (section 11.ii). But with the failure to replace Alsted’s work, the systematically organized, pedagogically orientated, Latin encyclopaedias worthy of the name exploded into innumerable discrete topics which were reorganized in alphabetical order in the various European vernaculars to create a new genre of academic reference works inappropriately labelled ‘(en)cyclopaedias’ first by Chambers in 1728 and then by D’Alembert and Diderot in 1751. The implications of this transformation for the shape of European knowledge were profound. The demise of the age-old tradition culminating in Alsted’s Encyclopaedia can therefore be regarded as a major watershed in European intellectual history created by the simultaneous political, military, confessional, and intellectual crises of the mid-seventeenth century (section 11.iii).
Main Currents in Western Thought: Readings in Western European Intellectual History from the Middle Ages to the Present