ABSTRACT
In a doctoral thesis undertaken at the University of Rennes and subsequently published at Manchester, Kathleen Lamb ley showed to what extent and in what way the French language was taught and used in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 1 This led to her speaking in general terms about the French dictionaries which were available to English readers in the period. It goes without saying that educated English people with a knowledge of French and Latin knew and consulted the French-Latin dictionary or dictionaries of Robert Estienne, and the publication in 1606 of Jean Nicot's celebrated Thresor de la languefram;:oise tant ancienne que moderne certainly did not go unnoticed in England. But such dictionaries, admirable for the precise definition of terms-and, in the case of the Thresor, also admirable for the ample provision of etymological information-had the great disadvantage of not providing English equivalents for the French terms which they registered. The educated English reader who, even with the help of Estienne or ofNicot, had not managed to find the English equivalent of a given French word, or had only done so imprecisely, had the possibility of consulting John Palsgrave's L' Esclarcissement du language franr;:oys (1530), a grammar which doubled as a dictionary, or indeed Lucas Harryson's Dictionarie French and English (1571 ), or indeed John Baret's Alvearie or triple dictionarie ( 1573, comprising an EnglishLatin-French dictionary, augmented with Greek in 1580), or indeed a work of slightly more importance for my purposes, the Dictionarie French and English ( 1593, re-using the title of Harryson's dictionary deliberately) published by the Huguenot refugee Claude de Sainliens, who had founded a school in London. The last-mentioned work, a semi-popular bilingual dictionary, together with the Thresor ofNicot, a vast work of erudition in which French and Latin were used interchangeably, encouraged Randle Cotgrave to outdo the former by making use ofthe latter.2
