Early-modern dictionaries of geography and gazetteers
Creating featured collections of full-text items in HathiTrust is a great way of building research corpora for data analysis. Metadata of items in HathiTrust collections can be downloaded in JSON format for quantitative analysis and linking data, and the full-texts of the items can be analysed through the HTRC research services including data capsules.
One of the collections I have built for my research on early-modern European islands is called “geographic dictionaries and gazetteers” which contains geographic lexica, geographic descriptions and gazetteers published between 1600 and 1800.
In order to identify relevant dictionaries of geography in German and French, the alternative title word “geographisch geographie geographicum geographia Erdbeschreibung Länder” were matched with “Lexicon dictionarium dictionnaire Handbuch Beschreibung Wörterbuch Atlas déscription” in the HathiTrust full-text search. A separate search was run to identify gazetteers.
If island regions are covered in these works is not always stated in the title. Therefore, full-text analysis is vital to find out what role (European) islands played in these more general descriptions of the known world or individual continents or countries.
Another important aspect to consider is the respective audience that each of these works addressed. Some publications such as “Abrégé de géographie commerciale et industrielle” very clearly indicate that they were written with a specific group of users in mind:
Publiée à une époque où naissait à peine l’enseignement dit professionnel, la première édition de cet Abrège de Géographie, spécialement destiné aux élèves qui se li- vraient à des études propres au commerce ou à l’industrie, fut adopté dans un grand nombre d’institutions pour l’enseignement ordinaire de la géographie; ce qui m’imposa l’obligation de faire subir quelques changements à ce livre dès sa seconde édition.
Zu einer Zeit veröffentlicht, als die sogenannte Berufsausbildung gerade erst begann, wurde die erste Auflage dieser Geographie-Fibel, die speziell für Studenten gedacht war, die sich auf ein Studium des Handels oder der Industrie vorbereiteten, in großer Zahl von Institutionen für den regulären Geographie-Unterricht übernommen; dies machte es für mich notwendig, einige Änderungen an diesem Buch in seiner zweiten Auflage vorzunehmen.
Other authors and publishers are less explicit, but their introductions nevertheless give us hint. Here, too, a quantitative text analysis of selected chapters can shed light on the production and dissemination of geographical knowledge across Europe.
Finally, bibliographies of geographical works published in the eighteenth century are a valuable source to better understand the popularity of certain (translated) publications or trace books that have not survived.
Gottlieb Heinrich Stuck’s “Verzeichnis von aeltern und neuern Land- und Reisebeschreibungen” was one such bibliography brining together geographically revelant publications in different languages and reflecting on the overall development of European travel and discovery:
“Allgemeine Historie der Reisen zu Wasser und Lande“, published in 13 (?) volumes in Leipzig in 1755, by contrast, is an elaborate re-narration of influential travel reports from Antiquity to the Enlightenment Age. Individual stories are embedded in a meta-narrative that is at the same time pan-European and – because of the eclectic re-telling for a German-speaking audience – national:
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Monika Barget (March 24, 2021). Early-modern dictionaries of geography and gazetteers. INSULAE. Retrieved November 7, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/qd8w
