From 1671 to 1759, this important predecessor to modern encyclopedias went through twenty editions, before it finally succumbed to the Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers. Moreri designed his encyclopedic work partly as a defense of the worldview of the Roman Catholic Church, and that editorial approach prompted competition from a rival encyclopedia, Pierre Bayle's Dictionnaire Historique et Critique. Moreri's work is noteworthy for its emphasis on historical and biographical entries, neglected by Bayle as well as by other competitors such as Ephraim Chamber's Cyclopedia.

SEARCH the Grand dictionnaire historique de Moréri

This Database has been built using an un-corrected Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process on images from the 20th Edition of Moréri's Grand dictionnaire historique (Paris: Les libraires associés, 1759 - a copy of which can be found in the Rare Books Collection of the University of Chicago's Special Collections Research Center). Given the inaccuracies of any OCR project, word searches will be run through a similarity function in the PhiloLogic3 search engine. Results will then be displayed based on the frequency of words occuring in articles. Article Headwords will point to the page image on which the Article begins - the user can then navigate through the dictionary on a page by page basis. Unfortunately, the similarity function will not allow any Regex or boolean operators in word searches.