You Could Look It Up (32 page)

There have been a few reference books specifically for women, some—though not all—written by women as well. In 1694
The Ladies Dictionary: Being a General Entertainment for the Fair-Sex: A Work Never Attempted Before in English
was published by “N.H.,” who had grand plans for “such a Book, as might be a
Compleat Directory
to the
Female-Sex
in all
Relations, Companies, Conditions and States
of Life; even from CHILD HOOD down to
Old-Age
, and from the
Lady
at the Court, to the
Cook-maid
in the Country.”
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Some entries offered definitions—“
Pregnant
, big with Child; also full, copious, ripe”—though not all are useful: “
Olive
, from the Olive Tree” is unlikely to illuminate those who were in darkness. Others offered cultural literacy: “
Philomela
, flying from
Tereus
, who had ravish'd her, and cut her Tongue out,” or “
Sappho
, stil'd for her curious Verse, the tenth Muse, but her wanton way of Writing hindered much of the Merit of them.” More common, though, were the moral lectures:

We find by lamentable, if I may not say, fatal Experience, that the world too much allows
nakedness
in Women; and 'tis now pass'd into a custom so general, that it is become common almost to all Women and Maids of all sorts of conditions… . Let us strive … to make these Women know how great their Fault is in coming to Church in such indecent Habit, and if I may presume to say, so as it were
half naked
.

There is much on sexual immorality: “
Prostitute
, (
prostituta
) she that for mony suffers her self to be abused by all that come, a common
Harlot,” or “
Prostitute Doxies
… will for good Victuals, or for a very small piece of Money, prostitute their Bodies … they are destructive Queans, and oftentimes secret Murtherers of the
Infants
which are illegitimately begotten of their bodies.” We know nothing of the author, but the word “your” in “The
Virtues and Accomplishments
of your
Sex
”
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gives a a strong hint that N.H. was a man—as does the condescension throughout.

The M. U. Sears who wrote
The Female's Encyclopædia
(1830) identifies herself as a woman, but we have to trust her on that; the name appears on no other books. (Perhaps she was the wife or sister of the publisher W. J. Sears.) The book is hardly a model of feminist enlightenment. Though it offered useful information, some of the advice is hard for modern sensibilities to tolerate. A section on “Learned Ladies” advises that “A lady should appear to think well of books, rather than to speak well of them”
4
—a nineteenth-century precursor of the girls-who-wear-glasses tagline. The author was convinced that “not more than one woman in fifty has it in her power to marry the man whom she really would prefer to all others.” “Women,” Sears declared, “are to conceal their feelings, although they like any of the other sex, or they will appear bold, and become objects of ridicule; and a lady of delicacy would rather die, than first disclose her partiality.”
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More heartening was Matilda Betham's
Biographical Dictionary of the Celebrated Women of Every Age and Country
(1804). Betham set out to write “a General Dictionary of Women, who had been distinguished by their actions or talents, … which had never been done in our language.”
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Not all her celebrated women were role models, and she backed away from then-controversial feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft. But she consistently tried to see things from women's point of view. Even Boadicea, usually depicted as a villainess of the first water, got a sympathetic three-page portrait. Eve, the source of all earthly evil in a long misogynist tradition, was “seduced by the evil spirit.” Betham's dictionary is almost a precursor of
A Feminist Dictionary
by Cheris Kramarae, Paula A. Treichler, and Ann Russo, published in 1985 at the height of second-wave feminism.

In the long history of reference books, women have rarely received their due, and even more rarely have been in charge of the text. Yet there
are a few honorable exceptions to the male-only rule. The late twelfth-century
Hortus deliciarum
, or
Garden of Delights
, was composed by Herrad of Landsberg, the abbess of Hohenburg, which may make it the oldest reference book by a woman. More recent is the work of Jacoba H. van Lessen, a lexicographer who joined the
Woordenboek der Nederlansche taal
—the greatest dictionary of the Dutch language, and one of the greatest dictionaries in the world—in 1929. Seventeen years later she was promoted to editor in chief, a position she held until her death in 1951. Susan Standring published the thirty-ninth edition of
Gray's Anatomy
in 2004, Marie-Hélène Corréard and Valerie Grundy edited the
Oxford–Hachette French Dictionary
, and Susan Ratcliffe is now editor of the
Oxford Dictionary of Quotations
. But they remain the distinguished exceptions.

Even in the twenty-first century, men still far outnumber women at the head of reference projects. Plenty of women work as lexicographers, but few have their name at the top of the masthead. And the brave new world of online reference does not seem much better. Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia estimates contributors are “80 percent male, more than 65 percent single, more than 85 percent without children, around 70 percent under the age of 30”
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—and some think that 80 percent figure is an underestimate. The Wikimedia Foundation estimates just 13 percent of Wikipedia contributors are women.

CHAPTER
13

COLLECTING KNOWLEDGE INTO THE SMALLEST AREA

The Great Encyclopedias

France and Britain had incompatible ideas about the role of authority in their dictionaries, with the Académie Française calling for an officially enforced standard of linguistic propriety and the English taking a more laissez-faire approach to the language. More differences appear in their attitudes toward the encyclopedia. This time, though, the French were not the authoritarians. The
Encyclopédie
was a product of radical Enlightenment philosophy, and its authors sought to overturn conventional pieties. British encyclopedists, conversely, sought to consolidate the received learning of the ages and pass it on to the next generation.

Ambitiously wide-ranging books were all the rage in seventeenth-century Europe. In 1677, Johann Jacob Hofmann, a professor at the University of Basel, published two sizable folios and called the work a
Lexicon universale historico-geographico-chronologico-poetico-philologicum
. In case that list of disciplines was not grandiose enough, in 1701 Fra Vincenzo Coronelli published the beginning of his
Biblioteca Universale, o sia Gran Dizionario Storico, Geografico, Antico, Moderno, Naturale, Poetico, Cronologico, Genealogico, Matematico, Politico, Botanico, Medico, Chimico, Giuridico, Filosofico, Teologico, e Biblico
. It was supposed to reach forty-five volumes, but Coronelli died after producing just seven, and he took his erudition with him to the grave. But another monster of a work—sixty-four volumes and 64,309 pages—appeared between 1731
and 1750, when the publisher Johann Heinrich Zedler, supported by nine editors, produced the
Grosses vollständiges Universal-Lexicon aller Wissenschaften und Künste
, or
Complete Universal Lexicon of all Sciences and Arts
, described in one source as “the most colossal of German compilations.”
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England had its own encyclopedias, foremost among them Ephraim Chambers’s
Cyclopædia; or, A Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences
, 2 vols. (1727, with 1728 on the title page), an attempt to explicate the mysteries of hundreds of trades when Britain was gearing up for the Industrial Revolution. Chambers, the son of Presbyterian farmers from the northwest of England, had worked as the apprentice to a bookseller, engraver, and globe maker. When his apprenticeship was over, he settled at Gray’s Inn and began a career as a journalist and translator.
2
His
Cyclopædia
was announced as the product of “
E. CHAMBERS
Gent.”—no mere tradesman he. But to judge by the title, modesty was not among Chambers’s gentlemanly virtues:

Cyclopædia; or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences; Containing the Definitions of the Terms, and Accounts of the Things Signify’d Thereby, in the Several Arts, Both Liberal and Mechanical, and the Several Sciences, Human and Divine: The Figures, Kinds, Properties, Productions, Preparations, and Uses, of Things Natural and Artificial; the Rise, Progress, and State of Things Ecclesiastical, Civil, Military, and Commercial: With the Several Systems, Sects, Opinions, &c. among Philosophers, Divines, Mathematicians, Physicians, Antiquaries, Criticks, &c.: The Whole Intended as a Course of Antient and Modern Learning: Compiled from the Best Authors, Dictionaries, Journals, Memoirs, Transactions, Ephemerides, &c. in Several Languages.

The book was priced at four guineas to subscribers—a huge amount, maybe two months’ wages for an unskilled day laborer. But sales were good, and Chambers was rumored to have been given a £500 honorarium by his publishers as a token of their gratitude. After his death in 1740, his
Cyclopædia
continued to grow. The fourth edition appeared in 1741, followed in 1753 by a huge two-volume
Supplement
.

These are formidable books, but few of them can be described as works of genius. Not so the
Dictionnaire historique et critique
(1697), a gloriously eccentric exploration of people considered important by the philosophical and political revolutionary Pierre Bayle. Bayle’s father and brothers were killed for their Protestantism, and Bayle himself, after concealing his faith, fled France for Protestant Rotterdam. There he worked on his oversized
Dictionnaire
—despite the title, more of an encyclopedia than a dictionary. Bayle was as driven as any scholar has ever been. “Plays, pleasure-parties, games, collations, excursions into the country, visiting, and the like recreations,” he said, “necessary to many students, as they say, are not in my line. I waste no time in that way. Neither do I waste time in domestic cares, nor in trying for place or for favor, nor in any such matters.”
3

The
Dictionnaire
is an intensely quirky book. The main text is a biographical encyclopedia of major thinkers from Aaron to Zuylichem. But that main text occupies just a narrow band at the top—most of every page is occupied by long, discursive footnotes, even footnotes on footnotes, that question and subvert the main text by challenging conventional religious, philosophical, and moral beliefs. A revolutionary treatise emerges in the notes: what looks at first like a biographical dictionary is actually a fierce work of advocacy for religious toleration, and an equally fierce attack on conventional moral principles.
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The
Dictionnaire
enjoyed the two sure signs of influence: rapid sales among the public, and rapid censorship by church and state. It was officially banned in France (not that the ban hurt sales), and the Reformed Church in Rotterdam summoned Bayle and quizzed him on his heresies.
5
But over the years the
Dictionnaire
numbered among its devoted readers Frederick the Great of Prussia, Voltaire, Edward Gibbon, and Lord Byron.
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The encyclopedic background, then, is deep, but much greater was to come. The eighteenth century was Europe’s greatest age of encyclopedias: more than fifty major general encyclopedias appeared in that period. And the greatest of them all so dominates the field that it is called simply
L’Encyclopédie
, as if all the others didn’t matter. The
Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers
(
The Encyclopedia, or Systematic Dictionary of Sciences, Arts, and Trades
) appeared between 1751 and 1766. It is not merely one of the world’s great reference books but one of the towering monuments of European intellectual history—even one of the most influential works in world literature. The historian Hans Koning makes a bold but defensible claim: “Perhaps no other book, or set of books, has ever had the impact in its century of those twenty-eight volumes.”
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