Introduction: Word and Self Estranged: Topographies of Meaning in Early Modern England

From its first recorded definition in 1280 – “from elsewhere, foreign, unknown, unfamiliar” – to its accreted connotation of “queer and surprising” a century later, the word, “strange” came to designate that which was irreducibly different. To early modern people “strange” therefore meant, in the broad sense, very much what it means today – alien, foreign, unfamiliar – while the verb “estrange” (linked to the Latin “extraneous”, its first recorded English usage in 1485) had, as with today, a progressive connotation: it referred to something that had once not been strange, something that had been separated or made strange.