Lexicons of Switzerland

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The article Lexica of Switzerland provides an overview of the various lexica that have been created on topics from Switzerland .

17th century

Several historical- topographical works were created in the 17th century , such as those by Sebastian Münster and Johannes Stumpf , as well as failed attempts or those that did not get beyond handwritten versions. The model for the first lexicons was Abbé Louis Moréri's work Le grand dictionnaire historique , which was first published in Lyon in 1674, revised several times and then translated. In Switzerland, the Basel professor Johann Jakob Hofmann Moreri took himself as a model and published the two-volume Lexicon universale [...] in 1677 .

18th century

The Basel librarian and professor Jakob Christoph Iselin improved a German edition of the Moreri (Leipzig, 1709), which, however, was flawed with regard to Switzerland. For this purpose he recruited employees in other cantons and in 1726 brought out a newly expanded Historical and Geographical General Lexicon […] in four folio volumes, which for the first time contained correct articles about the cantons, cities and Swiss personalities. Pierre Roques , pastor of the French Church in Basel, relied on these entries for his Moreri edition of 1731/1732.

The first alphabetically arranged historical encyclopedias appeared in Switzerland in the 18th century. The first lexicon dedicated exclusively to Switzerland, the 20-volume work General Helvetisches, Eydgenössisches or Schweitzerisches Lexicon (1747–1765), came from the Zurich banker Johann Jacob Leu . He benefited from his many years of experience with compilations as well as the connections he had due to his offices. On the other hand, the mistrust of the Catholic cantons and the sometimes inadequate skills of its informants hindered the work. In spite of this, he gathered a lot of new material on numerous places, families and people who had not previously found their way into the great universal lexicons. Leu wrote everything himself, came up with the financing and finished his work in less than twenty years because he opted for an efficient rather than a perfectionist approach. Using the same method, the Zurich pharmacist Hans Jakob Holzhalb submitted a six-volume supplement from 1786–1795 . However, he was only able to finance their publication by placing himself under the patronage of the cantonal governments.

At the same time, the Bernese Vincent Bernhard Tscharner combined in his two-volume Dictionnaire geographique, historique et politique de la Suisse (Neuchâtel, Geneva and Lausanne, 1775–1776) all the articles he had written for the Encyclopédie d'Yverdon , with them Supplements and corrections provided. From 1782–1784 the work was published in a German translation by Friedrich König and Jakob Samuel Wyttenbach .

19th century

In the first half of the 19th century, only the Basel-born Markus Lutz presented a lexicon, namely in 1822 the Geographical-Statistical Handicraft Dictionary of Switzerland for Travelers and Businessmen [...] (2nd, expanded German edition 1827–1835, 1st French 1836–1837). From 1848 onwards, with the support of risky publishers such as Hans Huber in Frauenfeld and Victor Attinger in Neuchâtel, considerable effort was made to provide Switzerland with reliable reference works.

20th century

The four-volume Swiss Artists' Lexicon by Carl Brun (1905–1917) was also published by Huber, the six-volume Geographical Lexicon of Switzerland (GLS, 1902–1910) , published in German and French , and the seven-volume Historical-Biographical Lexicon of Switzerland by Attinger including supplementary volume (German and French, 1921–1934). The latter had an eventful history. After Attinger had created a keyword list on the basis of the GLS and Leus works, from which he however distinguished himself, the First World War interrupted the company. Only after the end of the war could the editing and publication of the volumes be tackled under the direction of Marcel Godet , director of the Swiss National Library, and Heinrich Türlers , federal archivist and former Bernese state archivist. Attinger did not have an editorial committee, only managerial staff whom he found among the canton archivists and who were responsible for the search for authors. Thanks to citizenship, numerous authors were found who were responsible for the content of their articles, although the quality of the texts varied. A lack of discipline and proliferation led to budget overruns and considerable deficits, which particularly impaired the publication of the last volumes. The first volume was published in 1921, the seventh in 1933, followed by a two-part supplementary volume in 1934. A limited partnership , later a stock corporation , replaced the publisher, who was overwhelmed by financial commitment.

A reference work on Switzerland on a completely different basis was the Swiss Lexicon (1945–1948) , published in Zurich at the end of the Second World War, with an encyclopedic rather than historical character that appealed to a wide audience. It had great success in Germany, where there was a backlog of non-National Socialist works.

With a view to the 700th anniversary of the federal government, Wilhelm Ziehr , an editor -in- chief with German roots, adopted this form of lexica. For the six-volume Schweizer Lexikon 91 (1991–1993), which was reprinted in a twelve-volume popular edition from 1998–1999, he created a patronage committee and attracted a large number of authors from a wide variety of backgrounds. The entries about Switzerland are in principle originals, the quality of which varies, while the general articles come from the encyclopedia by Joseph Meyer . Also in 1991, the anniversary year, the four-language lexicon of Swiss literatures was published, which was the result of an initiative by Pierre-Olivier Walzer .

Due to the progress of knowledge and new historiographical methods, the demands on historical lexicons increased and their content-related program became correspondingly broader. The implementation was opposed by the difficulty of being able to survive commercially in a relatively small population with a work in three or even four languages. In the second half of the 20th century, various ideas for further lexicons were discussed, but only the specialized, limited and publicly funded projects were completed: the four national dialect dictionaries (dialectology), the artist lexicon of Switzerland XX . C. By Hans Christoph von Tavel and Eduard Plüss (1958-1967), the lexicons of the Swiss Institute for Art Research (1981, 1991, 1998) as well as the scale to 13 volumes Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (2002-), the same time, in German in French and Italian and also provides a one-volume Romansh edition. Furthermore, the research project General Knowledge and Society has existed in Zurich since 2002 . Encyclopedias as indicators of changes in social Importance of knowledge, education and information .

Historical and cantonal dictionaries

There are also cantonal historical dictionaries, sometimes limited to biographies. The canton of Vaud, for example, is covered by the encyclopedias of Louis Levade (1824), David Martignier and Aymon de Crousaz (1867), Albert de Montet (1877–78) and Eugène Mottaz (1912–1921), the canton of Aargau by the Biographical Lexicon published in 1958 des Aargau 1803–1957 .

Sources and literature

Archives

literature

Web links

Commons : Encyclopedias of Switzerland  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g Catherine Santschi: Lexika. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . January 21, 2008 , accessed December 4, 2019 .
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