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This is the first of three volumes offering a new history of lexicography in and beyond the early modern British Isles. This volume focuses on the period from the end of the Middle Ages to the year 1600, exploring the first printed dictionaries, Latin and foreign language dictionaries, and specialized English wordlists.
List of contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of illustrations
- Abbreviations
- Conventions
- Prologue
- 1: The medieval inheritance
- 2: The first printed dictionaries of English, French, and Latin
- 3: Palsgrave and some contemporaries
- 4: The Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot
- 5: Polyglot dictionaries
- 6: Bilingual dictionaries of vernacular languages in the 1540s and 1550s
- 7: Latin dictionaries of the 1550s
- 8: The Thesaurus of Thomas Cooper
- 9: Elizabethan dictionaries of vernacular languages before Florio
- 10: Dictionaries of Latin from 1565 to 1580
- 11: Dictionaries of Latin and Greek from 1581 to 1600
- 12: Wordlists with Hebrew, Arabic, and Armenian
- 13: The dictionaries of Florio and Minsheu
- 14: Specialized wordlists of English after the 1530s
- 15: Lists of old words
- 16: Lists of hard words, and of words in general use
- Afterword
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
John Considine taught English at the University of Alberta in Canada until 2021. He is the author of three books about the history of dictionaries in Europe from the late Middle Ages to the nineteenth century, including Small Dictionaries and Curiosity: Lexicography and Fieldwork in Post-Medieval Europe (OUP, 2017). He is also the editor of the Cambridge World History of Lexicography and a number of other volumes, and a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, of which he was formerly an assistant editor.
Summary
This is the first of three volumes offering a new history of lexicography in and beyond the early modern British Isles. This volume focuses on the period from the end of the Middle Ages to the year 1600, exploring the first printed dictionaries, Latin and foreign language dictionaries, and specialized English wordlists.
Additional text
It is a well-researched, well-written, and engaging book that I would highly recommend to anyone interested in this topic.
