You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  By the middle of the twentieth century, sex research was beginning to attract attention among the larger public. Books like Our Bodies, Ourselves, published in 1973 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, broke new ground by bringing a feminist concern with women’s health to the encyclopedia format. It was part of a movement in the 1970s that brought sex advice to the respectable middle-class world, above all with Alex Comfort’s The Joy of Sex: A Cordon Bleu Guide to Lovemaking (1972). Comfort was an amazingly versatile writer. His first book, The Silver River, an account of his South Atlantic travels, appeared before he was eighteen, and three years later he published his first novel, No Such Liberty, while he was a student at Cambridge University. He got his bachelor’s degree in 1943 and his M.A. in 1945, before earning a Ph.D. at the University of London in 1949. A year after taking his doctorate he published the anarchist tract Authority and Delinquency in the Modern State, as well as his first book on the subject for which he would be remembered, Sexual Behaviour in Society. From there it was on to the Royal College of Physicians and London Hospital, where he qualified in medicine and specialized in gerontology. That was the subject of a learned book, The Biology of Senescence, 1956, a subject he revisited for a popular audience in 1964 in The Process of Aging.

  In The Joy of Sex, the author’s name is rendered more respectable by the author’s credentials—“Alex Comfort, M.B., Ph.D.”—on the cover, a modern version of the attribution to the eminently respectable Aristotle. Comfort’s title echoed The Joy of Cooking, one of the most popular American cookbooks since its first publication in 1936. And the subtitle, with its promise of cordon bleu–style sex, no doubt cashed in on the craze for gourmet cooking that had swept America starting with Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961). Newly sophisticated palates, no longer content with tuna casseroles and Spam sandwiches, now wanted foie de veau à la moutarde and filets de poisson à la Bretonne. Comfort, or perhaps his publisher’s marketing department, was shrewd in promising a similarly sophisticated set of recipes for l’amour. With its scandalously frank discussion of sex—including positions other than missionary, and even venturing into swinging and spanking—it has been credited with sparking the sexual revolution. But in the long perspective, we can see that what appeared so new on its publication was part of a tradition that goes back centuries.

  CHAPTER 12 ½

  THE BOYS’ CLUB

  The writers discussed in this book range from harmless drudges to mighty emperors, from retiring scholars to revolutionary provocateurs. The reference shelf holds the works of child prodigies and wizened sages, profound linguists and mathematical geniuses. And yet one group is very poorly represented among the editors of reference books: women.

  Men, of course, have been much more visible in public life through most of history, and any list of great public achievements is going to be disproportionately male. But the exclusion of women is rarely as complete as it is in reference publishing. It is not hard to come up with great women poets, novelists, mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, and artists from antiquity to the present. But female lexicographers or encyclopedists are in exceedingly short supply. Women must have been active among the compilers of information—wives and sisters of the named editors probably did much of the real work in books credited to men—but, if so, they have left few traces.

  Though women have been hard to find on mastheads, they have long been imagined as part of a target audience. Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall (1604) was notoriously “gathered for the benefit & helpe of ladies, gentlewomen, or any other vnskilfull persons”; Henry Cockeram’s English Dictionarie (1623) was pitched at “ladies and gentlewomen” as well as foreigners; and Thomas Blount’s Glossographia “is chiefly intended for the more-knowing Women, and less-knowing Men.”1 The British School-Master; or, The English Spelling-Book included in its second edition (1722) a “vocabulary of most sorts of provisions, apparel, household furniture, &c. Very useful for all ladies, housekeepers, &c. who are defective in spelling.” But even these books that claimed to enlighten women gave them shoddy treatment between their covers. The first edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1769–71), for instance, devoted all of one line to the entry “WOMAN, the female of man. See HOMO,” and the Encyclopédie was just as dismissive. The first edition of Nathan Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum (1730) did not even offer a definition, just an etymology (and an inaccurate one at that): “WO’MAN [wiman, prob. of wamb and man, Sax.].” The Dictionnaire de l’Académie françoise (1694) likewise defined femme as “La femelle de l’homme”—the female of man—and then offered some instructive sentences containing the word: “God took woman from Adam’s side,” “women are naturally timid,” “that man is addicted to wine and women.”

  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.”2 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”3 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.”5

  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.”6 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”7—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

  Denis Diderot and

  Jean le Rond d’Alembert

  L’Encyclopédie

  1751–72

  Encyclopædia Britannica

  1768–71

  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.”1

  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.4 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.6

  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 ce
ntury of those twenty-eight volumes.”7

  The two guiding lights were Jean le Rond d’Alembert and Denis Diderot. D’Alembert, the illegitimate son of an aristocratic soldier and a renegade nun turned salonnière, was a scientific and mathematical prodigy.8 When just twenty-six, he published a pathbreaking work on Newtonian mechanics, and he became a member of three of Europe’s leading learned societies: the Académie des Sciences, the Königlich-Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften, and the Royal Society. His partner seems, at least at first, as different from him as can be. Diderot is famous as one of the greatest conversationalists of all time, owing to a uniquely powerful mind. He dabbled in “philosophical writing” when “philosophical” was a euphemism for anything that threatened the power of the state. The range of his interests has rarely been matched: he wrote poetry, novels, plays, literary criticism, philosophy, music criticism, scientific works, translations, and more. Unlike d’Alembert, whose mathematical writings attracted little notice from the authorities, Diderot was arrested in 1749 for his writings.

  The publishers’ original plan for L’Encyclopédie was simply a French translation of Chambers’s Cyclopædia. Diderot and d’Alembert were hired to supervise the translation, and d’Alembert in particular thought he was being invited only as an editor for the mathematical entries. “Borrowing” other nations’ reference books was common; Diderot himself had just finished translating and adapting Robert James’s medical dictionary. Once Diderot and d’Alembert got their hands on the project, though, they radically reconceived it. They were probably without revolutionary intentions at first—no one imagined an encyclopedia becoming the center of an intellectual firestorm. Eventually, though, they proposed a wholly new kind of book, “nothing less than the basic facts and the basic principles of all knowledge; it was to be a war machine of the thought and opinion of the Enlightenment.”9