2017/09/21 by Gabriele Stein · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Lexicography and Language Studies #Historical Linguistics and Language Studies #Renaissance Literature and Culture
paper · doi:10.1093/oso/9780198807377.001.0001
openalex publication_date 2017/09/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/01
The rediscovery of the classical texts of Greek and Latin antiquity, the progress in the sciences, and the immense extension of the geographical knowledge of the world during the Renaissance created an unparalleled need for vocabulary expansion in the European languages. Latin was still the language of learning, but a growing nationalism called for a lexical development in the vernaculars. The printing press made possible the production of dictionaries and their wide dissemination. Sixteenth-century Europe is linguistically characterized by a high productivity in dictionary publications. These are pan-European in character: they are based on the same Greek and Latin source texts, the same recognized authorial texts of the leading contemporary experts, they are polyglot for tradespeople and travellers, and they are multilingual for an educated readership. The present book investigates the relationship between these polyglot and multilingual works, demonstrates the influence of European scholarship (e.g. Ambrogio Calepino, Conrad Gesner, Hadrianus Junius, Robertus Stephanus), describes the authorial stance in word explanations, morphological analyses, and translations, and provides the first account of how early printers used typography to present the compiler’s lexical information on the page.