The Encyclopédie, that massive achievement of the French Enlightenment, was published in 32 folio volumes between 1751 and 1777 by the philosophes Diderot, d'Alembert and more than 140 collaborators.

Even before the last volume of the Encyclopédie appeared, an English publisher printed a translation of selections from that great work:

Select Essays from the Encyclopedy, Being the Most Curious, Entertaining and Instructive Parts of that Very Extensive Work, Written by Mallet, Diderot, d'Alembert and Others, the Most Celebrated Writers of the Age. London, 1772.

[click on above image to view a pdf of the front matter of the Select Essays]

Although the authorship of this translation is a mystery, we know something about at least one of the book's readers. According to the bookplate the Select Essays belonged to William Constable, the English Romantic painter. His copy is in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University (Call Number A4A 772E).

In the fall of 2004 the Swem Library at the College of William and Mary purchased a microfilm-produced copy from the Beinecke, and the helpful staff at the Lyon Gardiner Tyler Department of History scanned it. I distributed sections in PDF form to the students in my History 385 (France, 1648-1800) class and asked them to produce an edited e-text for publication on the Internet. In addition to typing the text into word processing files, they added explanatory notes, used HTML tagging to make the notes visible upon placement of the cursor over the term to be explained, and uploaded their work to a College server. By doing so they fulfilled a College requirement for computer proficiency. More important, thanks to their work and the technical skills of IT wizard Rob Nelson, selections of this classic work of the Enlightenment are available to Internauts around the world who may not read French or do not have access to the original text.

The genesis of this idea came from a panel discussion with Dena Goodman, Jennifer Popiel and Bryan Skib at the 49th annual meeting of the Society for French Historical Studies in Milwaukee, WI, in April 2003. Dena et al invited me to discuss their nascent, and since greatly expanded, Encyclopedia of Diderot & d’Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. They were recruiting volunteers to add translated articles to their site, and it occurred to me that using an old translation in the public domain would be an efficient means of adding articles to their stock. The prospect of involving undergraduates in this activity made it all the more appealing, as this allowed them to participate in the act of producing knowledge. I hope that soon the Encyclopedy project will be integrated with the work Dena and her colleagues have done and continue to do.

By working together to propagate knowledge of eighteenth-century thought, my students, Rob and I paid homage to the collaborative spirit of the Encyclopedists and, in our own small way, performed a historical reenactment of the Republic of Letters.

Ronald Schechter
The College of William and Mary
November 2004