Trees in the landscape: orchard trees in a 17th-century French dictionary

The 17th century was a time of change in both agriculture and architecture as both nobility and newly rich bourgeois sought to embellish country residences with gardens and orchards. Not only were new plants arriving from overseas, but gardening was being revolutionised by the likes of Le Nôtre, de la Quintinie and the lesser known Fatio. This was reflected in the Dictionnaire universel de Antoine Furetière, the first genuinely encyclopaedic dictionary. This paper starts by introducing the LandLex initiative, pan-European synchronic and diachronic collaborative analyses of simple words concerning the landscape in historical dictionaries. We then look at a selected number of orchard trees and their fruit in two editions of the Dictionnaire universel: the first edition of 1690 and that revised by Basnage de Beauval in 1701. To an extent, Furetière applied a model for classifying trees and fruit that can be extracted by analysis. Some entries went into excessive detail as those of pear, a highly fashionable fruit at the time. One major difference between the two is Basnage’s move from a single author approach to the use of field experts in certain areas, amongst which botany. Much was simply carried over, but when Dr Régis, Basnage’s expert in medicine and natural history, deemed an entry of scientific interest it was given a rewrite with new background texts being cited, thereby widening our vision of developing 17th-century science.

Hourglass Effect: The Late Seventeenth Encyclopaedic Dictionary and the Dissemination of Knowledge

The publication of the Dictionnaire universel of Furetière in 1690 ushered in the age of the encyclopaedic dictionary. This was a relatively short-lived phenomenon of little more than a hundred years, but one which pathed the way to modern encyclopaedias. Furetière having died in 1688, his successor was Basnage de Beauval, a protestant exile based in the United Provinces of the Netherlands. It was Basnage who in the new 1701 edition transformed the dictionary by enlarging it considerably to a more genuine encyclopaedic coverage and calling on specialists to rewrite key sections, notably on the natural sciences. The simile of the hourglass is a means to show how the dictionary mediated knowledge from a vast array of sources and made the data available to contemporary and current day users. This paper demonstrates the hourglass effect through the lexicographical and learned sources that Basnage and his major compiler of scientific data, Regis of Amsterdam, brought into service. It looks at how Regis used numerous botanical sources in writing entries on Brazilian flora. Finally, we examine the influence of the work on the phenomenon of the universal dictionary and the development of the encyclopaedia.

Activities and projects of the Bibliographical Data Working Group (DARIAH-EU)

The material aims to introduce the Bibliographical Data Working Group – part of the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH-EU) – and to feature projects fulfilled by this group. This working group since 2019 brings together specialists (as of today: 38 researchers) from a number of different countries and the main goals of the group are to foster the development of cooperation between bibliographies and serve as a platform for knowledge exchange aimed at bringing together creators of bibliographical data, scholars interested in using those resources in data-driven research, and theorists of bibliography and documentation. In the presentation two projects are described in detail: 1. the report “An analysis of the current bibliographic data landscape in the humanities: Bibliodata curation, research, and collaboration; 2. The project “Multilingual encyclopaedic dictionary of types of documents”. The purpose of the article is not only to describe these projects but above all to invite Congress members to collaborate on them.

НАЗВАНИЯ НА ЖЕНАТА РОДНИНА В БЪЛГАРСКИЯ ЕЗИК, ПРЕДСТАВЕНИ В ХЕТЕРОНИМНИ РЕДОВЕ / THE GENERAL DESIGNATIONS FOR A FEMALE RELATIVE IN THE BULGARIAN LANGUAGE PRESENTED AS HETERONYMIC ROWS

The article presents in a structured way the general designations for female relatives in the Bulgarian language using an onomasiological approach. The author argues that these names are heteronyms (not synonyms) and proposes a definition of a heteronymic row. The names under study are themselves organized in heteronymic rows. The language material is borrowed from the encyclopaedic dictionary of Bulgarian Family and Kinship Lexis, where the lexical units are arranged alphabetically.