Why read Encyclopédie noire?

Book cover of Encyclopédie noire

Book description

If you peer closely into the bookstores, salons, and diplomatic circles of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, sooner or later Mederic Louis Elie Moreau de Saint-Mery is bound to appear. As a lawyer, philosophe, and Enlightenment polymath, Moreau created and compiled an immense archive that remains a vital window into the…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Encyclopédie noire as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Jenny Shaw

Author

My favorite read of 2024 is Sara Johnson's "Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World" It is a creative, audacious, intellectually challenging, and beautifully written work of history, one that challenges our conventions about how to approach archives, sources, and the so-called "great men" of history. Moreau was an enlightenment era polymath, a lawyer and philosophe who left a vast archive that scholars of the eighteenth century French world (especially those of the Caribbean) have found indispensible to understanding the Age of Revolutions. Johnson's fabulous innovation is to write a collective biography about the people around Moreau…

From Jenny's 3 favorite reads in 2024.

Karen Graubart

Author

This is an original, exciting entry into the world of a French nobleman in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti): a polymath and a slave owner. Johnson puts his world back together by returning enslaved people to it, demonstrating how their knowledge made his intellect possible. The best kind of academic book, it stretches your brain and teaches you something truly new.

From Karen's 3 favorite reads in 2024.