Academy Dictionaries 1600-1800

Description

This is the first unified history of the large, prestigious dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, compiled in academies, which set out to glorify living European languages. The tradition began with the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612) in Florence and the Dictionnaire de l'Academie francoise (1694) in Paris, and spread across Europe - to Germany, Spain, England, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Russia - in the eighteenth century, engaging students of language as diverse as Leibniz, Samuel Johnson, and Catherine the Great. All the major academy and academy-style dictionaries of the period up to 1800, published and unpublished, are discussed in a single narrative, bridging national and linguistic boundaries, to offer a history of lexicography on a European scale. Like John Considine's Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2008), this study treats dictionaries both as physical books and as ambitious works of the human imagination.

John Considine is Professor of English at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is author of Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and is co-editor, with Sylvia Brown, of The Ladies Dictionary (1694) (2010).

'Considine achieves a good balance of primary and secondary sources, surveying the existing scholarship and advancing it with new research, and he writes with admirable clarity. ... Essential.' J. T. Lynch, Choice 'Rarely does one feel it's a privilege to read a scholarly work, but when I finished the last sentence of John Considine's Academy Dictionaries 1600-1800, I felt that privilege - I felt intellectual satisfaction and a humane connection to the subject I had not imagined on opening the book - and knew that I would soon read the whole book again, with yet more pleasure and benefit than in the first instance. Though a compact book, [it] is profound intellectual and cultural history, as well as essential history of lexicography, brilliantly executed. Considine manages to tell a story about a forest without losing sight of the very trees without which the forest would be merely an idea, rather than a historical reality, and he does so with remarkable - and characteristic - intellectual perspective and narrative dexterity.' Michael Adams, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America