The Maurists' Unfinished Encyclopedia

In this ground-breaking 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 Encyclopédie of Diderot and D'Alembert and the emergence of the encyclopedic dictionary in France.

Holmberg adopts a multidisciplinary approach to the challenges of studying a hitherto unexplored and incomplete manuscript. 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.