Abstract
<jats:p>This article explores how the emergence of a vernacular encyclopedic tradition coincided with a departure from the encyclopedia as an Enlightenment form of intellectual communication. It further considers how this disengagement from Enlightenment epistemic practices could remain largely unrecognised by contemporaries in the early nineteenth century. Drawing on latest contributions to the historiography, the article pays particular attention to the relationship between historia litteraria and encyclopedism, as well as to the European embeddedness of intellectual developments in Hungary. It then examines the Eschenburg encyclopedia translated by István Lánghy (1796–1832) and asks how the creation of a Hungarian-language encyclopedia relied on practices of translation and contributed to shaping contemporary conceptions of the history of science. The conclusion suggests that approaching the end of the Enlightenment through the history of encyclopedic literature offers a productive perspective for the history of science, yielding both methodological and interpretative insights.</jats:p>