Ioana Galleron and Geoffrey Williams (eds.). 2023. Dictionnaires et réseaux des lexicographes aux XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles. Études réunis par Ioana Galleron et Geoffrey Williams

1. Introduction

The word réseaux (‘networks’) associated with dictionaries in the title of a book printed in the first quarter of the twenty-first century might suggest web portals where many digitalised dictionaries of different types are gathered and searchable. But then the title adjusts its focus on the authors of dictionaries in centuries when lexicography was a matter of handwritten cards and physical filing cabinets.

However, digitalisation is involved in any case: the volume originated from the workshop organised in January 2020 within the ANR BASNUM¹ project, directed by Geoffrey Williams and designed to digitalise the 1701 edition of Antoine Furetière’s Dictionnaire universel (henceforth DU1701). This edition is a rewriting by Henri Basnage de Beauval of the 1690 edition by Furetière (DU1690). The research—remarkable in quantity and quality—mobilised by the BASNUM project revealed how Basnage’s work, neglected in favour of Furetière’s, actually deserves to be better known. DU1701 also suffered the unfair competition of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux² and this double vulnus caused Ioana Galleron and Geoffrey Williams to get involved in an operation of restitution patrimoniale (‘heritage restitution’) of Basnage’s role both inside the French (meta)lexicographic landscape and beyond.

The two editors also want to let Francophone researchers know the international influence which French lexicography had in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the French language played the role of international language of science; therefore, Ioana Galleron translated five out of the nine contributions gathered in the volume from other languages (mainly English) into French.

Since the Furetière/Basnage dictionaries appeared at a time when the distinction between a dictionary and an encyclopaedia was still blurred, Galleron and Williams speak of a proto-encyclopaedic tradition.

The entries in the Dictionnaire universel are in fact mini-summaries of the scientific knowledge of the time, meant for a ‘lay’ audience. The main additional features of DU1701 include a much more descriptive approach than DU1690, an attempt to create a veritable dictionary for non-Francophone learners, a significant increase of the terminological coverage and the use of an impressive range and quantity of scientific sources.

Basnage was at the centre of a network of ‘savants’, and a member of two great Academies of Science (the Royal Society in London and the Berlin Academy), which allowed him to echo the latest developments and advances in many a discipline. Finally, Basnage had the idea of consulting a specialist, ‘M. Régis, médecin à Amsterdam’, for a number of domains which he did not master (medicine, botanics, algebra), thus laying the foundation of teamwork, a method which was to be followed by certain successors and which showed all its power in the Encyclopédie by Diderot and D’Alembert (1751-1765).

The DU1701 contains one fourth more entries than DU1690 and the entries already present are revised and largely reconfigured. ‘There are only a few which have remained untouched, so while the essence is by Furetière, he could hardly claim half of the entire work’ states Basnage in his Preface to the DU1701.

It is worthwhile remembering that the notion of a monolingual dictionary entry at the time had not yet taken the form of a well-defined, canonical structure. Furetière, and to a greater extent Basnage, instead conceived the lexicographic text following the headword as a text in which to quote or confute the opinions of contemporary grammarians, language scholars, scientists and also, to a lesser extent, a place where attractive citations from well-known authors could be displayed to illustrate even delicate shades of meaning.

Dictionnaires et réseaux des lexicographes aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles is divided in two sections. The first one is devoted to the Dictionnaire universel and to its influence in other European lexicographic traditions. The second section collects studies on contemporary multilingual dictionaries published in different European countries not directly influenced by DU, but providing an illustration of how the proto-encyclopaedic trend worked across Europe.

Relevant topics discussed in the volume include the transformations of works stemming from the French Enlightenment once ‘re-located’ to such different contexts as Denmark, Italy, Portugal, and even Russia under the Czars. Likewise, the ‘modern encyclopaedic spirit’³ of DU1690 and 1701, and the work of Trévoux, is discussed in the context before the publication of the Encyclopédie. An event which marked the spread of a form of dictionary so different from the prescriptive approach of those produced by the European Academies.

Galleron and Williams’ introduction to the book, freely accessible on the Internet along with the Table of Contents⁴—provides a striking picture of the complex situation in which the DU1690 found itself. Even before it was placed on the market, the Dictionnaire Universel had already affected the works of the Académie française which considered it as providing unfair competition to its own dictionaries. Furetière was forced to publish abroad, his dictionary being banned by the Academy and deprived of the license for publication in France. On the other hand, however, the Academy itself was forced to revise its method and to hasten its working pace. The first edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie (1694) is a product which did not sell as well as DU1690. This situation led to the rapid production of an improved second edition, which however did not see the light of day until 1718.

Furetière died in 1688, before the DU was published. Motivated by the likely profits from the commercial success of his work, his publishers⁵ gave Henri Basnage de Beauval the task of providing an enlarged and revised edition. The second edition of the Universel, fully confirming the earlier success, was published in 1701.

The choice of Basnage for the revised edition of Furetière materialised upon the suggestion of Pierre Bayle⁶, regarded by many as a forerunner of the Encyclopédistes of the mid-eighteenth century, who had authored the preface of DU 1690. After the Nantes edict⁷ was revoked, Basnage fled to the Low Countries, like his brother and many other French Huguenots. Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (Historical and Critical Dictionary), whose publication began in 1697, inspired Basnage in his lexicographic activity.

2. Summary of contents

Five contributions are grouped in the first section, entitled ‘Le Dictionnaire Universel (1690) et ses échos’.

Sara Graveleau and Clarissa Stincone in their article ‘Un dictionnaire encyclopédique: sources linguistiques et religieuses du Dictionnaire universel de Basnage’ (pp. 23-54), highlight the principal changes occurring between DU1690 and DU1701⁸. Remarkable attention is given to Basnage’s recourse to the various dictionaries available at the time, including the one published by the Académie, which is credited by Basnage with the role of supreme arbiter.

Graveleau and Stincone examine the two fields whose entries proved most controversial to editors of the Dictionnaire de Trévoux. Stincone investigates 248 entries belonging to the domain of language description. Whilst the DU1690 entries were concise, Basnage turns them into short treatises with new examples of morphosyntactic rules and appropriates entries from the 1694 Dictionnaire de l’académie. He largely quotes from Vaugelas (1647), from the Grammaire raisonnée (1660) by Arnauld and Lancelot, as well as Richelet (1680) and Thomas Corneille (1694). On the whole, Basnage refers to 11 grammar authors and 16 works. He is also visibly concerned to help foreigners who speak a different native tongue, and supplies examples to be imitated.

Graveleau investigates 179 entries belonging to the domain of religion. Basnage’s sources comprise 63 authors, 48 Roman Catholics and 15 Protestants respectively (mostly Calvinists, 5 Huguenot refugees, 2 Lutherans and 2 Anglicans) largely contemporary and mostly French (51). Graveleau disagrees with the Trévoux editors who claim that Basnage has substantially given Furetière’s work a protestant turn and finds his position balanced. She observes that entries susceptible to polemical responses (e.g., extreme onction, calviniste, communion) have been ‘neutralized’. Entries such as chreme, amulette, iconoclaste have been dealt with from a Protestant angle. Basnage does not replace but actually adds Protestant viewpoints to the Catholic base of the entries. Pages 48-54 list the examined entries and the authors who can be said to be Basnage’s sources. Because he is publishing abroad, Basnage takes the liberty—probably upon the suggestion of the publisher, who wished to sell also to a non-Catholic public—to mitigate abbot Furetière’s Catholicism, something which the Jesuits inspiring the Dictionnaire de Trévoux clearly did not appreciate, emphasizing to the extreme the religious orthodoxy of certain entries.

In the contribution by Ioana Galleron, ‘Repenser le dictionnaire face au plagiat: du Dictionnaire Universel au Trévoux, et retour’ (pp. 55-80) Basnage’s second revision of DU, published in 1708, is examined.

The unfair competition of the Trévoux on the French market, and the faults of the Dictionnaire universel, of which Basnage de Beauval was aware, led the Dutch publishers to revise DU1701. Galleron shows that this was not only an opportunity for multiple corrections, but also for a restatement of Basnage’s lexicographic principles, issuing from his search for a kind of balance between describing the uses of words and presenting the nature of things and how they work. Whereas the Trévoux, guided by its aim to counteract ‘the poison of heresy’, adds Latin equivalents and erudite entries, Basnage refuses to expand the encyclopaedic spirit of his DU and ‘fait machine arrière’ backs up on his earlier exuberant explanations. It would be interesting to know to what extent this restraint on the encyclopaedic approach would feature the subsequent revision of DU, on which our author immediately started after publishing the 1708 edition. Basnage died without accomplishing it. Resumed in 1710, DU 1725-27 was pursued by Brutel de La Rivière after the publication of the second edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie in 1718 and saw the light of day thanks to the investments of a consortium of Dutch booksellers⁹.

The contribution by João Paulo Silvestre translated by Ioana Galleron, ‘Les sources françaises de la lexicographie portugaise des lumières’, (pp. 81-106) shows that Bluteau’s Vocabulario (1712-1728), with publication starting in 1712, mentions the Dictionnaire universel amongst its 140 consulted sources (94 Latin ones, 53 in French, 18 in Portuguese, 24 in Italian, 11 in Spanish), without revealing the crucial role it had exerted on the conception of his own work—an outstanding role nevertheless entirely visible, in the principles set out in the preface as much as in the nomenclature and in the configuration of some entries.

Rafael Bluteau was a Theatine scholar serving the Portuguese Inquisition, who manipulated DU1701 with caution. Removing a large amount of encyclopaedic information, he summarized entries for his Portuguese translation of Furetiére/Basnage. With his 10 volumes published between 1712 and 1728, totalling 38,000 entries, Bluteau wanted to offer a monumental dictionary in Portuguese like the ones already available in French and Italian. He also wanted his knowledge to appear wider than his own entries actually display, but his sources are clearly second hand. However, he shows a firm mastery of the DU microstructure and handles many items on topics which are not included in Furetière, using Portuguese sources for these novelties which he considers appropriate for a dictionary addressing Portuguese readers, but he ignores the problem of describing good usage or providing criteria for a normative description of the Portuguese language.

In her contribution ‘Régulation, résistance et réappropriation: Johnson et la lexicographie française’ (pp. 107-131) Lynda Mugglestone invites readers to ponder the partisan attitude, notably the resistance against French surrounding Johnson’s character and work in the collective imagination. Mugglestone emphasizes Johnson’s great familiarity with French lexicography. His Plan of a Dictionary of the English Language¹⁰, for example shows how the mere compilation of the catalogue of the Harley Collection had been an opportunity for him to study an impressive number of its 345 dictionaries, notably those listed in volume II of the Catalogue, in the section entitled ‘Dictionaria Gallica’¹¹. She also explains that in the 50 entries in which Johnson refers to the ‘Trévoux’, using the explicit abbreviation D. Trevoux or Trev. Dict. or Trev, he is actually referring to Furetière/Basnage’s work or to one of its subsequent editions. This she proves by juxtaposing a number of entries from DU1701 to those in Johnson 1755. Mugglestone therefore speaks of a kind of transnational hybridity: because the aim is to produce a dictionary of the English language, the text of the French entries from DU1701 is reshaped in English, yet preserves the illustrative power of the original source. Likewise, the Dictionnaire universel de commerce, d’histoire naturelle et des Arts et Métiers (Paris 1723) by Jacques Savary and John Harris’ encyclopaedic opus, Lexicon Technicum (1710), are cited in Johnson’s dictionary, while Chambers’s Cyclopaedia (1741 edition) indeed remains the most valuable component in Johnson’s intellectual inheritance.

The relevance of Chambers’s influence is restated by Alexander K. Bocast’s chapter entitled ‘La Cyclopædia d’Ephraim Chambers et les réseaux lexicographiques du XVIIIe siècle’ (pp. 133-159). Chambers stands out in English metalexicography as the father of the British encyclopaedic trend; his influence affected all lexicographers working after him, including Johnson. Crucial therefore, considering the aim of the volume edited by Galleron and Williams, is the long citation from Diderot which Bocast brings to our attention (p. 153): in Diderot’s words, Chambers’s work has great merit and deserves to be translated into other languages but not into French, given his limitless exploitation of French lexicography, notably of DU¹².

Contributions in the second part of the volume, entitled ‘Échos et transformations’, concern works which, though seemingly close to the Dictionnaire Universel in their overall conception, actually do not show any manifest influence of DU.

Simon Skovgaard Boeck, in his chapter entitled ‘La partie encyclopédique du projet de Grand Dictionnaire de Matthias Moth’ (pp. 163-181), shows that the Danish scholar Moth was conversant with Furetière’s work, which was part of his personal library. Geography was his favourite domain, and it is not covered by either Furetière or Basnage. But the absence of DU as a source for entries in medicine or botanics is perplexing, since these domains were favourites with Moth and with Basnage de Beauval. Moth’s project seems guided by a different encyclopaedic orientation: his choice to relegate encyclopaedic entries to the second part of his work suggests that he may rather have chosen the Dictionnaire des arts et des sciences by Thomas Corneille (1694) for a model, even though analysis does not reveal any clear imitation of the latter.

The contribution, by Elena Carpi and Francisco M. Carriscondo Esquivel, ‘Du Dictionnaire de Trévoux au Diccionario Castellano du Père Terreros: la nomenclature des cultes non catholiques’ (pp. 183-201) further investigates Graveleau’s theme in Part I of the volume. They find that Father Terreros y Pando (1786-93) definitely rejects DU in his Diccionario castellano, in favour of Dictionnaire de Trévoux, in its 1752 edition. The domain on which Carpi and Carriscondo Esquivel focus their analysis, terms designating different types of heresy, has undergone severe pruning through the editions of DU, to avoid all suspicion of confessional bias in these highly sensitive areas. On the contrary, such confessional bias is explicit in Father Terreros’s dictionary, since the Trévoux was, from this viewpoint, a neological source for Castilian. The Spanish Jesuit’s borrowings involve reductions and adaptations, aiming for synthesis for the sake of clarity, achieving pedagogical effects and even an easier reception in an Inquisition country.

Monica Lupetti, in her chapter on ‘Le Diccionario Italiano, e Portuguez (1773-1774) de Joaquim Da Costa e Sá: Sources et descendance’ (pp. 203-221) deals with a bilingual dictionary which is alien to the proto-encyclopaedic series evoked in the first part of the volume, yet presents a list of words extending beyond a basic vocabulary. This dictionary features semasiological sequences which reveal an intention to describe the world, not only to furnish equivalents for words. However, for the terminology of the arts and sciences the Portuguese lexicographer does not rely upon the most recent sources to define the specialized, discipline-specific vocabulary needed by specialists, as shown for, example by, his processing of the entry telescopio.

The last chapter, authored by Kira Kovalenko and Giorgi Molkov, ‘Les dictionnaires multilingues russes du XVIII siècle et leurs liens avec la lexicographie française’ (pp. 223-235) deals with eighteenth-century Russian lexicography. In a country run by an authoritarian and centralised regime, it is not surprising that scholars should turn to the Académie française for a model, rather than choosing the alternative models available in France at the time, in terms of dictionaries. Thus the Dictionnaire de l’Académie russe is meant to be a well-thought out work, which follows the principles of selection set by the ‘Immortels’ of the Académie française, pursuing a notion of language purity excluding, or narrowing, the presence of ancient, popular, foreign or regional words. The chapter shows, however, that a range of other sources from French lexicography are deployed, either in the original language or in a translated version, starting from the quadrilingual dictionary by Giovanni Veneroni (1700) (Jean Vigneron), which is the foundation of the Nouveau Dictionnaire français, italien, allemande, latin et russe by Ivan Sots, published in Moscow in two parts (1784 and 1787) with remarkable success.

The volume offers a general bibliography, with sections devoted to dictionaries, lexicons, encyclopaedias, other texts of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, reference works and critical papers, and websites respectively. The volume concludes with a very useful final index of names of pre-twentieth century authors, scholars, scientists, lexicographers, and politicians, complete with their dates of birth and death.

3. Concluding remarks

Galleron and Williams rightly believe that the proto-encyclopaedic tradition and the network generated by it have not been sufficiently investigated by scholars more interested in the protagonists of national lexicographic traditions. The volume hence focusses on the ‘post-Furetière’ period, not just detailing the directions and forms of his influential work but also, in a wider sense, tracing parallel developments, similarities and interactions across dictionaries throughout Europe which manifested this interest in universality. In other words, the ambition to cover the lexicon and the concepts describing the whole sphere of human knowledge. Given this vast horizon, it can be said that the aim has been indeed reached, though obviously partly so. The volume will certainly remind its scholarly readers of many other European dictionaries which would fit the proto-encyclopaedic tradition.

Acknowledgements

The reviewer would like to thank Giuseppina Cortese for her help in translating into English a text which was thought in Italian and French.

References

Footnotes