Kathleen Hardesty Doig has produced the first monograph studying the Encyclopédie méthodique in its entirely. She asks to what extent ‘the Méthodique replicated its main sources, the Encyclopédie and the Supplément’ (p. 1). The Méthodique comprised forty-three separate series made up of 177 volumes of text with an additional twenty-six volumes of plates. Analysing its content in comparison with the other encyclopedic projects of the Enlightenment is no small task. The Méthodique was meant to do more than update the content of the Encyclopédie; its most daunting goal was to correct the disorder produced by alphabetization. Entries would be categorized within particular series and shaped to fit the frameworks of a given field of knowledge. What we find in Hardesty Doig's analysis is the effects of placing the subject before the object.

Hardesty Doig, applying qualitative and quantitative comparisons of content, is more concerned with the Méthodique's textuality than with its materiality. At stake, however, is more than the percentage of unique content. She unpacks the perceived benefits of claiming originality. How does one differentiate scholarship from its antecedents? How are attributions strategic and political? How does one sell a project as new and unique while striving for enduring relevance? There are as many answers to these questions in the case of the Méthodique as there are series of volumes.

Her work focuses not on the overall directors but on the next tier down – the members of France's intellectual elite tasked with the dissemination of specialized knowledge to a literate public by managing teams of writers (though the publishers Charles-Joseph Panckoucke, Henri Agasse and Thérèse-Charlotte Agasse remain present in her text). She divides her chapters according to the fields of knowledge, series and editors that make up the Méthodique, and she explains the problems – epistemological, political and structural – that each subject posed organizationally. The editors sorted through the Encyclopédie, decided what was salvageable, managed new contributors and framed the various series through preliminary discourses. They also determined the organizational structure of their series – which often, nonetheless, defaulted back to alphabetization. She finds that while some editors disavowed the Encyclopédie for its weakness, others advertised the preservation of valuable and timeless contributions.

Her content analysis reveals themes, subjects and even identical entries recurring across various series. Some concepts, such as slavery, could not be compartmentalized in a single series, and instead were taken up by different editors and authors. By referring back to similar objects of study, Hardesty Doig demonstrates that giving priority to the subject changed the entries devoted to particular objects. She discovers examples where appropriated entries from the Encyclopédie would make it into several different series of the Méthodique verbatim. These repetitions are reproduced in her own work chapter by chapter, although she rarely flags them. Much as is the case in the Méthodique itself, it is easy to miss these insights if one does not explore the work cover to cover. Other series, such as ‘Philosophie’ and ‘Théologie’, were more likely to share strategies than base texts; in both cases, polemics were buried in articles less likely to draw the attention of censors. In her learned analysis, form and content are malleable. Editors shaped both under looming deadlines as they observed their given fields undergo radical change.

The Méthodique represents political tensions of knowledge formation, as well as broader political tensions of the moment. Hardesty Doig investigates the formation of new content as well as new series. The status of historical biography as its own series was, she explains, contentious. It threatened to become too capacious: including every significant historical figure was too ambitious a feat for an already ambitious project. Additionally, its own editor felt that pulling the biographies together removed them from those series centring on the discoveries or great works that made the biography worthy of inclusion. She detects both silences and repetitions; Marat and Robespierre ‘are notably absent’ (p. 129) from the six volumes of historical biography.

Both reproductions and omissions convey disciplinary turf wars, editorial expertise, political stances, the risk of censorship and the availability of other print sources. The editors, as she notes, were more than intellectuals chasing prestige. They were distracted by their need to earn income, they got sick, they were incarcerated during the Revolution and they sometimes died before completing their works. Aspects of the mundane, the political and the tragic are all a part of the history of this collaborative project.

Hardesty Doig highlights the particularities of how specific editors recycled and reorganized earlier works. ‘Médecine’ retained much of the original's text, and also underwent extensive revision and reorganization, integrating new subjects such as forensic and veterinary medicine. ‘Philosophie’ added a wealth of new entries but undermined its originality in its preliminary discourse. Instead, it marketed the retention of many of Diderot's original entries as a virtue. ‘Géographie ancienne’, in contrast, is so different from the original that it appears as though the Encyclopédie was hardly consulted. Her most interesting conclusions are less about the original content of the Méthodique – whole or piecemeal – than about what the claims regarding originality did for each series.

Rather than interpreting the Méthodique as an example of the Enlightenment disciplining scientific knowledge, Hardesty Doig's analysis demonstrates how different editors charged with different subjects approached this task. We find that even at the textual level, compartmentalization was no less challenging than in practice. Among her contributions is having revealed how individual editors decided what belonged to their given fields of study, and what this did to the object of study itself. The Méthodique, now more accessible for study and consultation through digital humanities projects, has become also a more conceptually accessible work because of Hardesty Doig's book. Her work treats the Méthodique as a site reflecting tensions in Enlightenment epistemological projects. An important avenue for further research would be an investigation of its generative effects.