Sixteenth-Century English Dictionaries

Abstract Sixteenth-Century English Dictionaries is the first volume in the trilogy Dictionaries in the English-Speaking World, 1500–1800. It offers a new history of the dictionaries, wordlists, and glossaries which were compiled and read by speakers of English from the end of the Middle Ages to the year 1600: in print and manuscript; monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot; free-standing or presented beside other works. The bilingual and polyglot wordlists treated languages such as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; French, Italian, and Spanish; other languages of Europe, the Near East, and the wider world; and Old and Middle English. They were an essential part of the cultural history of the early modern British Isles: the kinds of language study which dictionaries supported gave access to traditional knowledge, the high culture of the European Renaissance, and knowledge of a rapidly expanding intellectual world. The book surveys its subject matter from multiple perspectives, including the history of lexicography, the history of the English language, book history, and intellectual history.