The Encyclopédie and the Renvois

Denis Diderot's Encyclopédie, published in seventeen volumes of text and eleven of plates between 1751 and 1772, introduced a system of cross-references that Diderot called renvois and considered the work's most important innovation. A reader consulting the entry on "Agriculture" would find pointers to "Chemistry," "Botany," "Commerce," and "Political Economy" — connections the alphabetical arrangement had severed and that the renvois restored. The system was, in effect, a theory of knowledge overlaid on an alphabetical index: it asserted that knowledge was a network of relationships, and that the encyclopedia's purpose was not merely to store knowledge but to make the relationships visible. Ann Blair's framework treats the renvois as the culmination of a long tradition of explicit curatorial connection-making — a tradition whose contrast with the hidden index of contemporary AI systems reveals what curation has gained in scale and lost in transparency.