Dictionaries of Latin and Greek from 1581 to 1600

Abstract Chapter 11 completes the story of the Latin dictionaries of sixteenth-century England, and adds that of the Greek dictionaries produced in the 1580s and 1590s, with particular attention to the publishing history of these dictionaries. It begins with the Greek–Latin Lexicon Graecolatinum of Edward Grant; the Latin–Greek–English edition of Guillaume Morel’s Verborum Latinorum commentarii produced by Abraham Fleming; two smaller dictionaries with revisions by Fleming; and John Higgins’s Latin–English version of Hadrianus Junius’ subject-ordered polyglot Nomenclator. Next come the first major dictionaries produced in close association with the universities, Thomas Thomas’s Latin–English Dictionarium (Cambridge) and John Rider’s English–Latin Bibliotheca scholastica (Oxford). These were resented by the London book trade, leading to what might be called the first of the dictionary wars of the English-speaking world. The chapter ends with the first Latin–Scots dictionary, by Andrew Duncan, and the eccentric little dictionaries of Simon Sturtevant.