ENCEINTE (Lat. in, within, cinctus, girdled; to be distinguished from the word meaning “pregnant,” from in, not, and cinctus, i.e. with girdle loosened), a French term used technically in fortification for the inner ring of fortifications surrounding a town. Strictly the term was applied to the continuous line of bastions and curtains forming the “body of the place,” this last expression being often used as synonymous with enceinte. The outworks, however, close to the enceinte were not considered as forming part of it. In modern fortification the enceinte is usually simply the innermost continuous line of fortifications. In architecture generally an enceinte is the close or precinct of a cathedral, abbey, castle, &c.
ENCINA, JUAN DEL (1469-c. 1533), often called the founder of the Spanish drama, was born in 1469 near Salamanca probably at Encinas. On leaving the university of Salamanca he became a member of the household of the second duke of Alva. In 1492 the poet entertained his patron with a dramatic piece, the Triunfo de la fama, written to commemorate the fall of Granada. In 1496 he published his Cancionero, a collection of dramatic and lyrical poems. Some years afterwards he visited Rome, attracted the attention of Alexander VI. by his skill in music, and was appointed choirmaster. About 1518 Encina took orders, and made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, where he said his first mass. Since 1509 he had held a lay canonry at Malaga; in 1519 he was appointed prior of Leon and is said to have died at Salamanca about 1533. His Cancionero is preceded by a prose treatise (Arte de trobar) on the condition of the poetic art in Spain. His fourteen dramatic pieces mark the transition from the purely ecclesiastical to the secular stage. The Aucto del Repelón and the Égloga de Fileno dramatize the adventures of shepherds; the latter, like Plácida y Vitoriano, is strongly influenced by the Celestina. The intrinsic interest of Encina’s plays is slight, but they are important from the historical point of view, for the lay pieces form a new departure, and the devout eclogues prepare the way for the autos of the 17th century. Moreover, Encina’s lyrical poems are remarkable for their intense sincerity and devout grace.
Bibliography.—Teatro completo de Juan del Encina (Madrid, 1893), edited by F. Asenjo Barbieri; Cancionero musical de los siglos XV y XVI (Madrid, 1894), edited by F. Asenjo Barbieri; R. Mitjana, Sobre Juan del Encina, músico y poeta (Málaga, 1895); M. Menendez y Pelayo, Antologia depoetas liricos castellanos (Madrid, 1890-1903), vol. vii.
ENCKE, JOHANN FRANZ (1791-1865), German astronomer, was born at Hamburg on the 23rd of September 1791. Matriculating at the university of Göttingen in 1811, he began by devoting himself to astronomy under Carl Friedrich Gauss; but he enlisted in the Hanseatic Legion for the campaign of 1813-14, and became lieutenant of artillery in the Prussian service in 1815. Having returned to Göttingen in 1816, he was at once appointed by Benhardt von Lindenau his assistant in the observatory of Seeberg near Gotha. There he completed his investigation of the comet of 1680, for which the Cotta prize was awarded to him in 1817; he correctly assigned a period of 71 years to the comet of 1812; and discovered the swift circulation of the remarkable comet which bears his name (see Comet). Eight masterly treatises on its movements were published by him in the Berlin Abhandlungen (1829-1859). From a fresh discussion of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769 he deduced (1822-1824) a solar parallax of 8″.57, long accepted as authoritative. In 1822 he became director of the Seeberg observatory, and in 1825 was promoted to a corresponding position at Berlin, where a new observatory, built under his superintendence, was inaugurated in 1835. He directed the preparation of the star-maps of the Berlin academy 1830-1859, edited from 1830 and greatly improved the Astronomisches Jahrbuch, and issued four volumes of the Astronomische Beobachtungen of the Berlin observatory (1840-1857). Much labour was bestowed by him upon facilitating the computation of the movements of the asteroids. With this end in view he expounded to the Berlin academy in 1849 a mode of determining an elliptic orbit from three observations, and communicated to that body in 1851 a new method of calculating planetary perturbations by means of rectangular co-ordinates (republished in W. Ostwald’s Klassiker der exacten Wissenschaften, No. 141, 1903). Encke visited England in 1840. Incipient brain-disease compelled him to withdraw from official life in November 1863, and he died at Spandau on the 26th of August 1865. He contributed extensively to the periodical literature of astronomy, and was twice, in 1823 and 1830, the recipient of the Royal Astronomical Society’s gold medal.
See Johann Franz Encke, sein Leben und Wirken, von Dr C. Bruhns (Leipzig, 1869), to which a list of his writings is appended. Also, Month. Notices Roy. Astr. Society, xxvi. 129; V.J.S. Astr. Gesellschaft, iv. 227; Berlin. Abhandlungen (1866), i., G. Hagen; Sitzungsberichte, Munich Acad. (1866), i. p. 395, &c.
(A. M. C.)
ENCLAVE (a French word from enclaver, to enclose), a term signifying a country or, more commonly, an outlying portion of a country, entirely surrounded by the territories of a foreign or other power, such as the detached portions of Prussia, Saxony, &c, enclosed in the Thuringian States. (From the point of view of the states possessing such detached portions of territory these become “exclaves.”) “Enclave” is, however, generally used in a looser sense to describe a colony or other territory of a state, which, while possessing a seaboard, is entirely surrounded landward by the possession of some other power; or, if inland territory, nearly though not entirely so enclosed, e.g. the Lado Enclave in equatorial Africa.