ABSTRACT
In recent times, scholars have been greatly preoccupied with deciding whether or not Enlightenment thought was coherent, self-contradictory, organically whole, or hopelessly confused or, in some ways, all four. The Encyclopedie has gradually come to be seen as the summa of Enlightenment values, beliefs and attitudes, not merely in France but much more widely too. If encyclopedic activity in Switzerland got off to a slower start than in other countries, it soon became the most important centre for piracies and reprints of the great work in the whole of Europe. The striking occurrence of editions of the Encyclopedie produced in Italy can be explained by the fact that, even though somewhat venerable compendia were available in that country at this period, there had hitherto been no modern large-scale Italian encyclopaedia. While Italy was the setting for wholesale reprints of the Encyclopedie, the market for it in England was far less buoyant.
