Contenu du sommaire : Qu'était-ce qu'écrire une encyclopédie en Chine ?

Classified Books : Chinese encyclopedias Under the Chinese word leishu translated by " encyclopedia " rests a kind of books with nebulous limits. These classified collectanea of quotations very often cover all the fields of knowledge and cannot be assimilated with anthologies and florilegia. This is a particular and extremely compound kind of compilation. It can gather literary or biographical anecdotes as well as administrative documents or Buddhist or Daoist facts and ideas. Chinese encyclopedias are sometimes as short as an ordinary vademecum or include several thousands of chapters and can be compiled by only one scholar or by a few thousands of scholars employed in a State enterprise of cultural splendor.

The essay deals with two imperially sponsored encyclopedias of the early Northern Song. On the one hand, written under different premises, they show how flexible compilers were in creating new encyclopedias. On the other hand they also display the rather different understanding that emperors had of the function of these works. The first one, the Imperial Digest of the Reign of Great Tranquility (Taiping yulan), was a more general work, dealing with all natural and supernatural phenomena in the known world, whereas the Models from the Archives (Cefu yuangui), compiled just three decades later, was a handbook for government, and thus limited to administrative matters. Both encyclopedias reflect nevertheless the control the two emperors personally involved in the compilation of the two works had over their scholar-officials and the interest they had in recreating literary and scholarly traditions that had suffered in the chaotic period prior to the founding of the Song in 960.

This paper focuses on a small subset of privately compiled and commercially published Chinese examination encyclopedias and discusses how the expansion of examination culture and commercial printing shaped the production and circulation of encyclopedias in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It examines how encyclopedias came to be produced and used as textbooks and how they were increasingly used as reference tools. It combines the discussion of the changing material aspects of encyclopedias with an analysis of the intellectual politics of their production.

General knowledge and studies of myriad things (of heaven, earth, and human) in the history of knowledge were usually organized in patterns that do not readily fit into the conventional categories of " science " as we know them today. Sometimes, Chinese intellectuals or literati did form communities for studying subjects under categories easily recognized today. In most cases they did not form distinct communities for subject specific studies, nor did intellectuals always organize knowledge in patterns familiar to us today. This does not mean that studies written in " alternative forms " or organized in alternative patterns are irrelevant to the history of knowledge; on the contrary, many constitute an essential part of ancient Chinese knowledge. This paper outlines some general steps in understanding the body of texts today usually called biji (literally, " brush notes ", or " pen notes "), which flourished in Northern Song China. Further consideration of these texts and how they contributed to the history of knowledge in Song China will also be discussed. Through the examination of these texts and how their emerging patterns of studies are organized according to principles that differ from our own today, they stimulate and challenge our modern conceptions of knowledge and science.

The mushrooming of reference (leishu) and daily-use encyclopedias (riyong leishu) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries drew on earlier book collections, which Chinese literati previously had valued as texts while preparing for civil examinations or for collecting source materials needed by officials to carry out their activities. Since 1000, these traditional collections transmitted a specific epistemological approach for investigating things, events, and phenomena. Beginning in the mid-thirteenth century under Mongol rule, new types of leishu developed, some of which, owing to the steady expansion of printing as well as literacy and the corresponding proliferation of a bookish print culture, reached a much wider readership than ever before. On the one hand, these new types of leishu covered a wider range of knowledge. On the other hand, they represented a form of classicism that approached things/events/phenomena textually, i.e., in a lexicographic and etymological way. Using the encyclopedic form, compilers increasingly applied the ideals for " investigating things and extending knowledge " (gewu zhizhi) beyond the classical corpus. This textual approach to natural studies and practical knowledge culminated in the creation of textual repositories simulating " textual museums. "

The history of Chinese astronomy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be considered as competitions in archive building between the Jesuits and Chinese astronomers. This paper describes the life history of the Calendrical Treatises of the Chongzhen Reign to demonstrate how the life of an archive is embedded in the sociopolitical network that sustains its existence, and how a shift of this network transforms the meaning of the archive. The Calendrical Treatises of the Chongzhen Reign is an imperially commissioned collectanea aiming at translating astronomical and mathematical knowledge transmitted from Europe in the seventeenth century. This paper illuminates how the compilation process of the Calendrical Treatises of the Chongzhen Reign and its variants bear the mark of struggle among interested social groups which attempted to stabilize the meaning of a body of knowledge by bestowing on it a corporeal format so as to inscribe meaning on the materiality of these books. An analysis of the compiling process and using of archives thus is the " commencement " to unravel the power relationship beneath the archive.

The Latin Florilegium as a Point of Comparison By attending to the many parallels between Chinese leishu and Latin florilegia which were numerous in Europe from the middle ages through the 17th century, I suggest that the study of florilegia and that of leishu can fruitfully draw on one another. I consider briefly problems of terminology (especially the term " encyclopedia "), the contexts in which florilegia were used and the methods by which they were compiled.

The Wall and the Books This conclusion places the six essays presented in this issue in three contexts : 1. The differences between two techniques of reproducing texts : xylography in China and typography in the West, 2. The comparison between different encyclopedic genres in the East and the West : reading-notes, compilations of commonplaces, anthologies of works, and more particularly encyclopedias 3. The tension between the fear of loss and the fear of excess in each culture, the proliferation of texts, and their scarcity.