Le grand dictionaire historique
Le grand dictionaire historique is an encyclopedia by Louis Moréri (1643–1680).
Moréri first published the one-volume work in Lyon in 1674 and dedicated it to the Bishop of Apt, Gaillard de Longjumeau . The focus of the book was on historical and biographical articles, as the full title indicates: Le grand dictionnaire historique, ou mélange curieux de l'histoire sacrée et profane, qui contient en abregé, les vies et les actions remarquables des Patriarches, des Juges , des Rois des Juifs etc. (German "The great historical dictionary, or 'interesting mixture' of spiritual and secular history ..." ).
The importance of Moréris lies above all in the fact that his grand dictionnaire ushers in the era of national-language lexicons. It was also the impetus for the Dictionnaire historique et critique by Pierre Bayle .
expenditure
The grand dictionnaire was reissued in multiple revisions; the number of issues is controversial among experts - around 24 are counted inconsistently, probably also because volumes of the same issue were sometimes printed in different places (→ 1740!). In addition to the first edition, the following requirements are guaranteed:
- Lyon 1681 (the second edition)
- Paris 1699
- Paris 1718 (5 vols.)
- Amsterdam, The Hague and Utrecht 1724 (4 vols.)
- Paris 1725 (6 vols.)
- Basel 1731/1732
- Amsterdam, Leiden, The Hague and Utrecht 1740 (8 vols., Folio, 39.8 × 25 cm)
- as well as the last, 10-volume, Paris 1759
Moréri died in 1680 at the age of 37, so did not even see the second edition. Later editors (including Jean le Clerc , Louis-Ellies du Pin and Louis-F.-J. De La Barre ) created some very independent works that recently had little more than the title in common with the first edition: Moréri was recognized as a "branded product" acted.
Translations
The work was published in English, German, Dutch, Italian and Spanish.
Johann Franz Buddeus brought out German editions in Leipzig with Thomas Fritsch (publisher) 1709–1714, 2nd edition 1722, and 3rd "much increased and improved" edition by Fritschen's heir Caspar Fritsch 1730/32 in four volumes. They bore, evidently with variations, the title General Historical Lexicon, in which the life and deeds of those patriarchs, prophets, apostles, fathers of the first churches, popes, cardinals, bishops, prelates, distinguished learners of God, along with their heretics; like no less of those kaysers, kings, elders and princes, great lords and ministers; the same of those famous learners, scribes and artists, furthermore, and finally, the descriptions of those kayships, kingdoms, principalities, free states, landscapes, islands, cities, castles, monasteries, burgs, rivers and so on are presented.
The 1709 edition, dedicated to King Friedrich of Prussia , later prompted the editor of Zedler's Lexicon to write the following:
"[...] Johann Peter von Ludewig [the Chancellor of the University of Halle, who wrote the preface to Zedler's first volume] reports with relish how Majesty first looked up Berlin. Then the king found it written that his royal seat was in the Old Mark Brandenburg. Everyone knew that Berlin was in the Mittelmark. Thereupon the king thought the whole work had failed. "
When Caspar Fritsch published the 3rd edition in 1730–1732, he was outraged by Zedler's 1730 announcement of an eight-volume universal lexicon. In order to eliminate the suspected plagiarist, he took legal action (and with some success) against the Zedler project.
The Basel librarian Jakob Christoph Iselin recruited employees in several cantons in order to improve the 1709 edition, which was very flawed in relation to Switzerland, and in 1726 he published his newly enlarged Historical and Geographical General Lexicon [...] in four folio volumes. Pierre Roques took over these improvements again in his Moréri edition, Basel 1731–32.
Work on the Spanish edition began on the basis of the six-volume French, Paris 1725, but was not completed until 1753 - 73 years after Moréri's death, and nine years after the death of the most important translator José de Miravel y Casadevante (1614–1744), who in the title of the ten volumes printed in Paris and Lyons appears.
literature
- Louis Moreri: The Great Historical, Geographical and Poetical Dictionary, Reprint, Routledge 1999, ISBN 0-415-20044-X
Individual evidence
- ↑ On the title page referred to as "onzième édition" (11th edition).
- ↑ Marked on the title page as "dix-huitieme édition" (18th edition).
- ^ Arnold Miller, in: Frank Kafker: Notable Encyclopedias , Oxford 1981. ( Memento of September 26, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Quoted in abbreviated form from Deutsches Museum, The competitive company of Fritsch in Leipzig
- ^ Catherine Santschi: Lexica. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . January 21, 2008 , accessed June 8, 2019 .
- ↑ filosofia.org