It's big. It's bold. And it's here.
Hundreds of distinguished academics working around the globe under the guiding hand of well-known Penn History Professor Alan Kors have spent over six years writing, editing and perfecting the four-volume, 1,800-page Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. The work is currently available.
"It's like giving birth," Kors said. "Suddenly, there's this living thing in the world."
The Enlightenment, which swept the intellectual scene from the end of the 17th century to the start of the 19th, marked the emergence of reason and practical knowledge's challenge to the traditional, largely religious authorities of the day.
It is a testament to Kors' leadership that Romance Languages professor Joan DeJean, a contributor of numerous articles to the encyclopedia, viewed the experience as "a fun project to work on because people were being supportive at the press," and "a smooth process" overall from her perspective as one of the work's authors. But the encyclopedia did not come easily into this world.
"I lived through three changes of project editor at Oxford and three different publishers of the division, so I had to run interference for the project three separate times, establish my intellectual and moral presence three separate times," Kors recalled, concluding that "a major hunk of my life and soul and mind went into this."
Given the international character of the effort, Kors remembered the editorial problems posed by "authors who said 'You don't need to translate my work, I write English perfectly,' who didn't."
Kors said he received "neither assistance nor reward" from the University or the History Department for the project. In fact, Kors implied that, though many Penn faculty became involved in the project, the University was largely unaware of the momentous work taking place.
"For six years, without knowing it, Penn was the center of the major enterprise of Enlightenment studies in the world," he said.
Many credit the award-winning professor with almost single-handedly driving the encyclopedia to completion.
"There would never have been an encyclopedia of the Enlightenment without Alan Kors' vision of the intellectual goal..., tenacity in dealing with the publisher... and graciousness in dealing with authors, of whom there were hundreds in different countries with different agendas," editor Lynn Hunt said.
A former Penn professor who took time from her post as current president of the American Historical Association to serve on the encyclopedia's editorial board, Hunt stressed the importance of the work to the intellectual community.
"The scholarly world will be grateful to [Kors] for decades to come, because this will be the definitive work on the Enlightenment for several generations," she said.
Currently the only high-quality Enlightenment reference available in English, the work's astounding breadth and diversity of opinions renders it a unique accomplishment.
Citing Diderot, the father of the intellectual concept of the encyclopedia, as inspiration for the character of his editorial style, Kors takes Diderot's position in defense of the unity, honesty and value that such a large work with such diverse roots and opinions can offer.
"Each thinker, each science, each art, each subject has its own language and its own style," he said. "Why not conserve that?"
Modern telecommunications and the Internet were crucial to achieving the international diversity of background and opinion he sought. Kors noted that "email and the ability to send electronic documents has changed the scholarly world this way... it's really quite wondrous in what it makes possible."
Indeed, its awesome value as a definitive Enlightenment reference and its curious cutting-edge technological backbone aside, the nature of the project itself makes an intellectual statement.
Lamenting the "very fractious, divided intellectual" times, Kors "wanted to demonstrate that you could bring together scholars from around the world, from the best of the traditionalist to the best of the innovative, whose work was rarely associated with each others'."
"The notion of this common enterprise elicited the best, most open-minded, most innovative, most rigorous work from virtually every participant," he said. "The only curse word was tendentiousness."
History Department Chair Jonathan Steinberg summed the enterprise up neatly and admiringly.
"The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment is an astonishing scholarly achievement," he said.
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