This book on sixteenth-century English dictionaries by John Considine will be welcomed by anyone interested in lexicography. It is the first volume in a trilogy, the next two volumes of which will treat the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Online Oxford English Dictionary has recently been drawing on the lexicons of this long period, moved by groundbreaking books on John Palsgrave (1530) and Sir Thomas Elyot (1538) by Gabriele Stein, the Ashgate series on early modern lexicographers, EEBO-TCP (Early English Books Online Text Creation Partnership) and Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME). Considine discusses three themes in this period's English dictionaries, glossaries and wordlists: their diversity, their multilingualism and their reliance on continental lexicography. Most monolingual wordbooks not relying on European sources serve the mother tongue alone. Considine has an impressive knowledge of major and minor wordbooks and makes sustained, acute observations on their makers, texts and sources. Sometimes he passes over sizeable English works like those by John Marbeck, William Lambarde, John Gerard and William Camden. Nonetheless, Considine's treatment of anglists John Barrett, William Mulcaster and Edmund Coote is original and telling. In over two hundred manuscripts from several dozen repositories, he also locates fresh references to new copies and marginal annotations that describe their owners’ ‘human experience’ of these wordbooks, notably ‘Queen Katherine Parr inscribing her copy of Estienne's Mots jrancois’ and ‘the child spoiling his or her copy of Coote's English Schoole-maister’. Considine succeeds in grounding dictionaries in records of their English owners, annotators and readers at home, school and church.

One would never guess that anything has been missed from his index groups on ‘dictionaries and wordlists as books’, ‘firsts of their kind’, ‘inscriptions in and on dictionaries’, ‘paratexts in dictionaries’, ‘schoolmasters’, ‘sexual vocabulary’ and ‘titles of dictionaries and wordlists’. One deliberate omission, evident from the index, is ‘the technical details of the structure and presentation of wordlist entries’, apparently including definitions (of things, by species and differentiae). They turn up almost entirely in treatises, very rarely in dictionaries but, given that the belief of period grammarians and lexicographers (including Samuel Johnson) that words could not be defined, are important, for in 1551 logician Thomas Wilson claimed that words were indeed definable. Their definitions varied widely, from any declaration at all to a word's etymon. Later logicians upheld Wilson's opinion, although lexicographers ignored them, at least until the preacher Thomas Wilson published his Christian Dictionarie in 1612. These logicians anticipate the modern position successfully championed by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). A discussion of words and things would have proved useful here because dictionaries have long competed with encyclopedic wordbooks for attention in the knowledge industries, but Considine excludes the encyclopedic from his scope.

He briefly treats some encyclopedic wordbooks either named as dictionaries or clearly dedicated to words. Four are important. William Lambarde's Dictionarium Anglic Topographicum & Historicum: An Alphabetical Description of the Chief Places in England and Wales (1730, but penned in the 1570s) is the first ‘alphabetized reference book which is not primarily concerned with words’ and yet which uses the title dictionary. John Cowell's The Interpreter (1607, 2,218 packed word-entries), William Strachey's first English–Algonquin dictionary (912 translational glosses), and Wilson's A Christian Dictionarie (1612, 3,814 word-entries), although these may be treated in the second volume. The full title of Cowell's monolingual English dictionary is The Interpreter: Or Booke Containing the Signification of Words: Wherein is Set Foorth the True Meaning of All, or the Most Part of Such Words and Termes, as are Mentioned in the Lawe Writers, or Statutes. English headwords (names of writs excepted) are often followed by a Latin translation in parentheses, but his explanations, although studded with Latin and French citations, are about the English word of law. Ripe for comment here, The Interpreter was the largest monolingual English wordbook until Sir Thomas Blount's Glossographia (1656), which has 688 pages. Robert Strachey's dictionary of Virginia or Eastern Algonquin, the language of Powhatan, was not published, despite being meant to help in colonizing Jamestown in Virginia and in trading with its native peoples, intentions that did not turn out well for the indigenous peoples. Strachey's bilingual dictionary must have been devised entirely by the English. It is still important today because the efforts of nations towards ‘truth and reconciliation’ with indigenous peoples are transforming America. Thomas Wilson's Christian Dictionarie (also 1612) claims to open ‘the signification of the chiefe words’ of the Bible, and sometimes he even ‘ioyned the definition of the thing expressed by such a word’. His was a brave, reasoned work in a treacherous field, given the sectarian basis of the future civil war. Considine's choice of dictionaries understandably favours word-entries about words rather than about the things denoted by words as signifiers.

I turn now to the organization of the book. It has a Prologue, sixteen chapters, Afterword, Bibliography, list of manuscripts and individual copies of early printed books inspected personally or seen in unpublished photographs, and an Index. The Prologue describes the historical content of the dictionary genre, previous pioneering accounts (Gertrude Stein, DeWitt Starnes and Gertrude Noyes, Jürgen Schafer and R. C. Alston) and the trilogy's scope. Its dictionaries include all wordlists in English or Scots, and any others in which neither was used but was made by ‘or had a significant circulation among’ English speakers. This would seem to include many dictionaries printed on the continent and brought across the Channel. Considine stresses that his story concerns both tradition and originality, and centrally the ‘human experiences’ of the people who wrote and read wordlists.

Chapter 1, ‘The medieval inheritance’, discusses medieval Latin–English manuscript dictionaries, the many-versioned Medulla Grammatice and the Catholicon Anglicum. Chapter 2, ‘The first printed dictionaries of English, French, and Latin’, deals mainly with Promptorium Parvulorum (1499) and Ortus Vocabulorum (1500), Caxton's French–English booklet (c. 1480) and other smaller texts up to 1530. The first two printed dictionaries served the twin markets for Latin–English lexicons: the first employed English headwords to help students, and the second used Latin headwords that their teachers could already read. Both texts were reprinted for thirty years. The next eleven core chapters mainly discuss dictionaries.

Chapter 3, ‘Palsgrave and some contemporaries’, discusses John Palsgrave's French grammar, Lesclarcissement (1530), whose wordlists used English in the headword position. He depended on Promptorium as a source for these. Bundled here are four early lexicographers: John Rastell, legal publisher (Expositiones Terminorum Legum Anglorum, c. 1523); Nicholas Udall, schoolmaster (Floures for Latine Spekynge, 1534); William Turner, herbalist (Libellus de re Herbaria Nouus, 1538 and Names of Herbes, 1548); and Andrew Boorde, a medical writer (Breuiary of Helthe, 1547). Considine says that none of these was meant to be a dictionary ‘in the limited, modern sense’.

Chapter 4, ‘The Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot’, describes its first printing of 1538, its revision as Bibliotheca Eliotae (1542, 1545) and later editions by Elyot's assistant Thomas Cooper (1548, 1552, 1559). Elyot and Cooper first translated their Latin–English dictionary from the work of an Italian humanist, Ambrogio Calepino, and in 1565 Cooper shifted to the French printer, Robert Estienne. All Latin dictionaries at this time stemmed from the Elyot–Cooper texts.

Chapter 5, ‘Polyglot dictionaries’, includes first a mixed group of handbooks that linked multiple European languages, Sex Linguarum Dictionarius, which added English in 1537, and Noel van Barlement (Berlaimont) of Antwerp, a comparable vocabulary that first inserted English in 1576. This tradition also had large lexicons, Hadrianus Junius’ Nomenclator (1567) and a Calepino group that added English first in 1585.

Chapter 6, ‘Bilingual dictionaries of vernacular languages in the 1540s and 1550s’, introduces two double-vernacular dictionaries for adults, William Salesbury's Welsh–English (1547) and William Thomas’ Italian–English (1552). Considine includes here some miscellaneous wordlists, including some small Spanish wordbooks under Mary I.

Chapter 7, ‘Latin dictionaries of the 1550s’, collects the four Latin–English dictionaries for schooling that followed from Elyot–Cooper. These were Jean Véron's Latin–English–French Dictionariolum Puerorum, Richard Howlet's English–Latin Abcedarium, both in 1552, John Withals’ Shorte Dictionarie of 1553, and the first version of Robert Barrett's Alvearie.

Everything from 1509 to 1553 served the state as recreated by Henry VIII. Palsgrave had taught French to Mary, the king's sister, and Elyot had advised the king directly in The Governor (1531), before both men dedicated their monumental works to him. Salesbury's dictionary helped Henry VIII to solidify his control of Wales by compelling Welsh taxpayers to learn English. By 1542 he had required every schoolmaster to use William Lily's grammar, which had wordlists. In 1552–3 the four school dictionaries in the reign of Edward VI positioned themselves as complementary to that grammar. The dictionary that succeeded was clearly John Withals’ long-reprinted and re-edited book for students, which was characterized by English headwords and an encyclopedic organization. Few today would credit Henry VIII with making English great again, but in his reign the nation's statutes and the Bible, and three important languages, French, Latin and Welsh, were mapped into English.

The next six core chapters deal with major lexicographers under Elizabeth and James. Of those, three concern Latin dictionaries. Chapter 8, ‘The Thesaurus of Thomas Cooper’, treats the largest, most learned Latin–English lexicon. A revisionist work, this translates, not Elyot's Calepine, but Johannes Fries’Dictionarium Latinogermanicum, a German derivative of an Estienne Latin lexicon. This is the only chapter devoted to one lexicographer's lexicon. As Considine ends the middle chapter of his book, he says that Cooper, born in obscurity, died ‘a great man’. There is little doubt who is the hero of this story. Chapter 10, ‘Dictionaries of Latin from 1565 to 1580’, discusses less well-known lexicographers, John Barrett and his student-assisted English, Latin and French dictionary (1574 and 1580), and five other talented men who made a glossographer's living from 1566 to 1580. These included Lewys Evans, who edited Withals, John Higgins, who extended Howlet, and Abraham Fleming, who added Greek to Barrett. Peter Levins was an innovator, authoring an English–Latin dictionary based on rhyme. Chapter 11, ‘Dictionaries of Latin and Greek from 1581 to 1600’, treats Edward Grant's Englishless lexicon, Guillaume Morel's Verborum Latinorum Commentarii (edited by Abraham Fleming), John Higgins’ Englished Nomenclator of Hadrianus Junius, the Dictionarium (1587) by Cambridge University printer Thomas Thomas, the Oxfordian John Rider's Bibliotheca Scholastica (1589) and Andrew Duncan's Latin–Scottish dictionary.

With chapter 9, ‘Elizabethan dictionaries of vernacular languages before Florio’, Considine shifts his emphasis onto living tongues. He harvests wordbooks of French, Spanish and Russian, and wordlists of Irish and the languages of North America, West Africa, the Arctic, South East Asia, the Caribbean and Madagascar. The last represent the earliest language encounters between the English and indigenous people. Chapter 12, ‘Wordlists with Hebrew, Arabic, and Armenian’, turns to the learned, living tongues of the Mediterranean and the Christian orient. Here are discussed William Patten's Armenian manuscript transcription and his biblical place-name dictionary, Calender of Scripture, John Udall's Hebrew–English grammar and dictionary (1593), the Herrey concordances of the Bible and William Bedwell's Arabic–Latin lexicon, a manuscript. Two of these texts have no English. Chapter 13, ‘The dictionaries of Florio and Minsheu’, treat Florio's Italian–English (1598, 1611) and Minsheu's Spanish–English (1599, 1617) and polyglot Ductor in Linguas (1617). Florio contributed polished English translational glosses, and Minsheu produced the first etymological dictionary of English.

The last three chapters are about wordlists: chapter 14, ‘Specialized wordlists of English after the 1530s’; chapter 15, ‘Lists of old words’; and chapter 16, ‘Lists of hard words, and of words in general use’. These packed surveys are fascinating testimony to how many non-lexicographers contributed to the huge gains made by English vocabulary. Glossarians, more frequently than dictionaries, used treatises to invent or derive new words to denote new things. They include the likes of Bartholomew Traheron (medicine), William Turner (herbs) and Robert Recorde (arithmetic).

Considine has described this challenging genre to excellent effect and brings together the scholarly findings of many researchers. Whether the ‘human experience’ of these utilitarian works, whether this matter (as he says) has a heart, is less certain (p. 4). For example, Considine begins his book with a quotation from The Scolemaster by Elizabeth's language tutor, Roger Ascham:

Ascham urges students to use, not a dictionary, but their own grammar book so as to find the rules of Latin.Footnote ¹ He thought the grammar best fulfilled the objective of a dictionary. Another major mid-Elizabethan literary figure, Sir Philip Sidney, also disliked dictionaries. That anyone should be taught his own native tongue was alien to Sidney. In The Defence of Poesie (1595), he objected to ‘that hony-flowing Matrone Eloquence, apparrelled … in a painted affectation’. Her ‘farre fet words, that many seeme monsters’, are foreigners to poor Englishmen, driven ‘with coursing of a letter, as if they were bound to follow the method of a Dictionary’ (i3r). Sidney clarifies this ‘method’ in Astrophel and Stella (1591) when he says, ‘You that doe dictionary method bring / Into your rymes, running in ratling rowes’ (sonnet 15, cited in OED s.v. dictionary, n. and adj., C1.a). To them might be added the question posed by Shakespeare's Juliet, ‘What's in a name?’

However, the herbals and medical treatises that treated pain and broken bodies must have given hope. Nicholas Udall's translation of Thomas Geminus’ Compendios a Totius Anatomie Delineatio (1553), not mentioned here, had 2,594 letter/numbers keying anatomical images to a description of the body-part they showed. These function as word-entries. As Considine has also shown, wordlists of place-names grounded early moderns in knowledge about their homes and histories; and proper-name lists informed readers about historical figures after whom they were named. Both offered insight into experiences close to their humanity. Notably, both Elyot and Minsheu added place-names to their second editions, Minsheu at the expense of deleting several of his ten non-English languages.

The most powerful book at this time was the English Bible, and concordances were its dictionaries. One concordance not part of Considine's story shocked Bishop Stephen Gardiner, who agonized that English lexicographer John Marbeck, the renowned Windsor organist and composer, was killing off Latin by making a concordance of Henry VIII's Great Bible. Marbeck barely escaped burning at the stake for authoring a wordbook that was an English assembly. His wife's pathetic plea and Bishop Gardiner's ultimate decency prevailed, and Henry VIII pardoned the organist, but as Marbeck's concordance (STC 17300; Alston III.ii.587) was seized and destroyed, Marbeck had to start again. Here is one of his three entries for the English headword ‘Imaginacion’:

Each of the three entries devoted to ‘Imaginacion’ corresponded to a different Latin sense in the Vulgate that Marbeck cited, likely out of respect for Gardiner. Marbeck's entries combine, in order, an opening English headword, its glossarial translation in a Vulgate concordance, two illustrative quotations from the English Old Testament and cross-referenced headwords that read like English synonyms. Marbeck's estimated 8,000 entries are an early guide to English vocabulary.

Sixteenth-Century English Dictionaries advances our understanding of Tudor and Stuart English dictionaries. Considine effectively persuades us of his three themes, their diversity, multilingualism and indebtedness to continental lexicography. His last three chapters seem to add a fourth theme, the accelerated growth of English words through the stimulating mapping of English explanations for foreign headwords. The European lexicographers who doubtless gave England a knowledge of Latin, Greek and Hebrew words were very late in recognizing English. In mid-century, Conrad Gessner had notoriously labelled English as a mixed, corrupt tongue, and Florio in 1578 insulted English as being worth nothing overseas, reflecting Gessner's prejudice. William Camden put an end to this nonsense in the 1580s. Meanwhile, wordbooks with an English component at home thrived, although Henry Bynneman's monopoly on printing (classical) dictionaries, which largely failed, and the coming dictionary ‘wars’ pitted one classicist lexicographer against another. English in glossaries, wordlists and dictionaries, in contrast, not only experienced an unprecedented surge of vocabulary, evident from OED statistics, but also increased in length and richness. This growth is a fourth theme that deserves mention.