Historical Encyclopedias

14 encyclopedias from Pliny's Rome to the French Enlightenment, shown as artifacts: real pages, photographed or scanned by the libraries and museums that hold them. Several are lost or nearly lost — the Hortus Deliciarum burned in 1870, and fewer than 4 percent of the Yongle Encyclopedia survives. Explorer members can zoom into all 17 plates at full resolution and open 76 annotated notes, each tied to its source.

MEMBERSCOMPLETED 77 CE

Pliny the Elder, Natural History

Thirty-seven books on 'the nature of things, that is, life' — the encyclopedia Europe kept copying for fifteen hundred years.

MEMBERSC. 1121 (AUTHOR'S OWN COPY)

Liber Floridus

A twelfth-century canon's 'book of flowers' — and the autograph survives, in the author's own hand.

MEMBERS1167–1185

Hortus Deliciarum (Garden of Delights)

An abbess's illustrated encyclopedia for her nuns. The book burned in 1870; what survives are the copies made before it did.

MEMBERSWRITTEN 13TH CENTURY

Qazwini, The Wonders of Creation

A thirteenth-century cosmography that runs from the angels and planets down to the smallest insect — copied and illustrated for six hundred years.

MEMBERSCOMPILED 1403–1408

Yongle Encyclopedia (Yongle dadian)

The largest encyclopedia of the pre-modern world. Fewer than 4 percent of it survives.

MEMBERSWRITTEN 7TH CENTURY

Isidore of Seville, Etymologies

A seventh-century encyclopedia of world knowledge — and, in its first printing, the earliest example of a printed map of the world.

MEMBERSMAINZ, 1491

Hortus Sanitatis (Garden of Health)

A printed natural history in which real fish swim beside mermaids — Cambridge calls it the first natural-history encyclopedia.

MEMBERS1551–1558

Conrad Gessner, Historia animalium

A 4,500-page encyclopedia of animals that drew accurate pictures — and still included the unicorn, with a note of doubt.

MEMBERS1637

Tiangong Kaiwu (The Exploitation of the Works of Nature)

A Ming encyclopedia of farming and industry that nearly vanished in China and survived through Japan.

MEMBERSBOLOGNA, 1642

Ulisse Aldrovandi, Monstrorum historia

A history of monsters published 37 years after its author died — assembled from the notes he left behind.

MEMBERSFIRST PUBLISHED 1658

Comenius, Orbis Sensualium Pictus

An encyclopedia of the visible world for children — often called the first children's picture book.

MEMBERS1712

Wakan Sansai Zue

An illustrated Japanese encyclopedia of heaven, earth and humanity — including the river creature kawatarō, better known as the kappa.

MEMBERSLONDON, 1728

Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopaedia

The two-volume English dictionary of arts and sciences that, translated, became the starting point of the French Encyclopédie.

MEMBERS1751–1772

Diderot and d'Alembert, Encyclopédie

The Enlightenment's great reference work, which began as a translation of Chambers and became a political event.

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