ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates how two groups of historical social actors, namely usurers and bankers, were written about in seventeenth-century discourse. This study is based on an analysis of the EEBO corpus drawn from the transcribed version of Early English Books Online made available by the Text Creation Partnership. Usurers were mentioned in relation to associates who were connected to their businesses. The analysis of banker, however, has the additional benefit of being guided by Usage Fluctuation Analysis (UFA), a recently developed methodology of diachronic analysis that is able to identify points in time where shifts in meaning take place by means of a helpful visualization. The output of the UFA procedure is a simple graph showing the convergence or divergence between collocates moving through time. The consistent collocates biting, griping, and covetous reveal how negative opinions were stacked against them throughout the century. Other collocates suggest that they were associated with prostitution, theft, drunkenness, and bad language.
