ABSTRACT
Early modern English dictionaries have often been studied from a formal and teleological perspective, as members of a series of monolingual works leading from the little wordbook of Robert Cawdrey in 1604, through Samuel Johnson's dictionary 150 years later, to the highly sophisticated and comprehensive dictionaries of the twentieth century. Their degree of resemblance to modern dictionaries has been seen as the most important thing about them. 1
This has led to several misunderstandings. First, treatments in English of the history of lexicography have tended to be confined to English, and hence to identify early English dictionaries misleadingly as originary texts. This paper will discuss sixteenth-and seventeenth-century English dictionaries with a focus on what they do, not on what they are supposed to adumbrate. Secondly, because the most prestigious dictionaries of English since 1750 have been monolingual and comprehensive, these characteristics have been privileged in the study of earlier dictionaries. The work of Gabriele Stein, Ji.irgen Schafer, and others has done much to set this right, and the collection of facsimile reprints selected by R. C. Alston and published by the Scolar Press under the
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general title 'English Linguistics 1500-1800' provides a rich introduction to the multilingual range and varying specialized concerns of early modern English linguistic thought. 2 There is, however, still no account which tries to provide a unified context for the texts which will be discussed in this article: nobody has tried to write a general history of lexicography in early modern England.
