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Lexicography, Printing Technology, and the
Lexicography, Printing Technology, and the Lexicography, Printing Technology, and the
Lexicography, Printing Technology, and the
Spread of Renaissance Culture
Spread of Renaissance Culture Spread of Renaissance Culture
Spread of Renaissance Culture
Patrick Hanks
Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics,
Charles University in Prague
patrick.w.hanks@gmail.com
Abstract
AbstractAbstract
Abstract
Historians of lexicography in the English-speaking world have implied that Robert
Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (1604) is the first English dictionary. Landau (1984,
2001) makes this claim, adding that it is “the least inspiring of all seminal works”. In
this paper, I agree that the Table Alphabeticall is uninspiring, but I deny that it is a
seminal work. Landau overlooks the rich 16
th
-century tradition of Renaissance and
Humanist lexicography in Europe, in particular the Dictionarum, seu Thesaurus
Linguae Latinae of Robert Estienne (1531) and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae of his
son Henri Estienne (1572). These seminal works are astonishing achievements—
breathtaking innovations—in terms of both scholarship and technology. They set
standards for subsequent European lexicography. Two technological innovations
made these great dictionaries possible: the invention of printing by Gutenberg in
Strasbourg in about 1440 and the typography of Nicolas Jenson in Venice in 1462.
These technological developments and the lexicographical achievements that were
made possible by them contributed, in the first place, to the Renaissance programme
of preserving the classical heritage of ancient Greece and Rome and, in the second
place, to the role of dictionaries in spreading Renaissance culture and Humanism
across Europe. The paper goes on to briefly outline the emergence of bilingual
lexicography, replacing the polyglot lexicography that was standard in the 16
th
century. A comparison is made between the influence of printing technology on 16
th
century lexicography and the potential influence of computer technology on 21
st
century lexicography.
1. Dictionaries before Cawdrey
1. Dictionaries before Cawdrey1. Dictionaries before Cawdrey
1. Dictionaries before Cawdrey
Surveys of English lexicography, starting with Murray (1900), tend to give the
impression that the first English dictionary was Robert Cawdrey’s Table
Alphabeticall, published in 1604. This little book is a dictionary of hard words,
mostly ‘inkhorn terms’—learned words that were introduced in profusion from Latin
into English by scholars during the 16
th
century. Apart from the fact that Cawdrey’s
book is addressed to women—who, in the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries were rarely fortunate
enough to receive a Latin education, although in those times competence in Latin was
a requirement for career success—the Table Alphabeticall is a historical curiosity of
comparatively little intellectual or cultural interest. It had no ambition to be a
reasonably full inventory of the lexicon, a goal that had been pursued (for Latin) by
several important lexicographical works in Continental Europe in the 16
th
century.
The notion that a dictionary should serve as an inventory of the lexicon of a language
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was not an innovation of English lexicographers.
The prominence assigned to Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall by Murray (1900) and by
subsequent Anglocentric writers such as Starnes and Noyes (1946) had the
unfortunate effect of deflecting attention from the rich lexicographic tradition of the
European Renaissance in the 16
th
century, in which English was only one of several
participant languages—a rather minor one, as we shall see. Starnes (1963) tried to
correct the false impression given by his earlier work, but apparently in vain. Landau
(1984, 2001) describes Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall as a seminal work, adding
that it is “the least inspiring of all seminal works”. The Table Alphabeticall is
indeed uninspiring, but it is not a seminal work.
The word dictionary itself came into English as an inkhorn term in the mid 16
th
century. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) shows that the Medieval Latin word
dictionarium was coined as early as 1225 and was used to denote a collection of Latin
words arranged according to subject, rather than in alphabetical order. More exotic
synonyms such as glossarium ‘glossary’, cornucopia ‘horn of plenty’, elucidarius
‘elucidator’, and thesaurus ‘treasure house’also became widespread.
OED comments:
Dictionaries proper are of two kinds: those in which the meanings of the
words of one language or dialect are given in another (or, in a polyglot
dictionary, in two or more languages), and those in which the words of a
language are treated and illustrated in this language itself. The former were the
earlier. —OED second edition, s.v. dictionary
So what were these Renaissance dictionaries before Cawdrey? What did they consist
of, how and where did they originate, who compiled them, and what was their
purpose?
Scholarly studies by Starnes and Talbert (1955), Starnes (1963), Considine (2008),
and an excellent chapter by Bately (2009) in Cowie’s monumental Oxford History of
English Lexicography have gone some way towards correcting the misleading
impression perpetuated by Landau and others. Bately shows how lexicography
developed as a scholarly and cultural activity during the 16
th
century. She observes
that lexicographers both of Latin-English dictionaries and of other foreign language-
English dictionaries turned to the continent for models and sources.
So, when, in 1538, Thomas Elyot […] produced his unidirectional Latin-
English Dictionary, the authorities he cited included French, Dutch, and
Italian contemporaries, who, like him, were seeking to provide the linguistic
tools demanded by the ‘New Learning’. It was the monolingual Latin
Dictionarium of ‘Calepinus’ – Augustinian friar Ambrogio Calepino of
Bergamo –, first published in 1502, that was his chief source. And when
Elyot’s dictionary was reissued in 1542 as the Bibliotheca Eliotae – Eliotis
librarie, it was from the Dictionarium Latino-Gallicum (1538) of French
printer Robert Estienne […] that much of its new material was derived.
More will be said about Calepino below. And it should be noted here, at the outset,
that Estienne was much more than a printer in the modern sense. He was also a
classical scholar, an editor, a publisher, and a Humanist thinker, conversing on equal
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terms with the leading Parisian intellectuals of his day.
2. The development of printing and typography
2. The development of printing and typography 2. The development of printing and typography
2. The development of printing and typography
The development of lexicography in 16
th
-century Europe was dependent on the
development of printing technology and the associated craft of punch-cutting and
type-founding. Dictionary-like compilations pre-dated printing, of course, but
dictionaries as products for widespread general use only became available because of
the rapid reproduction of identical copies that printing made possible. Collections of
words with glosses were created in monasteries as manuscripts throughout Europe in
the later Middle Ages. Mostly, these works consisted of collections of Latin words
glossed into vernacular languages, for the benefit of young novices learning to read
Latin texts, sometimes arranged (more or less roughly) in alphabetical order,
sometimes thematically. For propagation each manuscript had to be laboriously
copied out by hand, and each act of copying could produce only one copy at a time,
each with its own idiosyncrasies and copying errors. The invention of printing by
Johannes Gutenberg in about 1440 in Strasbourg (subsequently moved to Mainz)
changed everything, not only for lexicography but for all other fields of knowledge, as
discussed by Eisenstein (1979). Suddenly, rapid replication and massive
dissemination of identical copies of a text—including large and complex texts such as
dictionaries—became possible.
Three components contributed to and are intertwined with the development of
lexicography and with each other: the invention of printing, the rediscovery of
classical Latin literature, philosophy, and art (including lettering), and the
development of challenging thinking that constituted the Reformation. The history of
all these events has been intensively studied, but their interaction bears re-
examination, for an understanding of it will crucially affect our appreciation of the
early history of European lexicography. Let us first look at the relationship between
printing and lexicography.
After Gutenberg, a key figure is Nicolas Jenson, a man of German extraction who was
born in 1420 in Sommevoire, France (about half-way between Paris and Strasbourg).
By the 1450s, Jenson had risen to become controller of the French royal mint at
Tours. In 1458 he moved to Mainz, where he evidently became fascinated by the
technology of printing with movable type, recognizing its potential for the rapid
dissemination of knowledge. To this technology, he devoted the rest of his life. After
a few years as a printer and publisher in Mainz and Frankfurt, Jenson moved to Italy,
where, in Venice in 1468, he set up shop as a printer, publisher, and typographer.
Between 1468 and his death in 1480 he edited and printed about 150 books, mostly
editions of Latin theological tracts, but also some Latin classics, some Greek, an
Italian guide to medicinal herbs, and miscellaneous other works. Jenson was not the
only printer and typographer in Venice in the 1470s, but he is surely the most
important of them.
Let us look a little more closely at his typographic principles, which were to play such
an important role in the development of lexicography in subsequent decades, not only
in Venice, but also as far afield as Paris, Lyons, Frankfurt, and Geneva. Jenson’s type
styles were based on the clean lines and subtle distinctive serifs of the lettering on
monumental inscriptions that had been created by anonymous Roman stonemasons
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and other craftsmen a millennium and a half earlier. An important part of Jenson’s
contribution to the Renaissance was his replacement of the heavy black lettering style
of medieval manuscripts, which had served Gutenberg for a model, with the more
sharply defined letters of the ancient Roman alphabet.
A key principle of early Venetian typographers, in particular Jenson, was legibility.
The generic term for this style of typography is Antiqua, in contrast to the Germanic
Black-Letter style. As far as we know, Jenson designed, cut, and founded his own
type. No doubt his experience of overseeing working in metal at the French Royal
Mint stood him in good stead. According to an advertisement issued by his firm
shortly after his death, Jenson’s typographic symbols, “do not hinder the reader’s
eyes, but rather help them and do them good. Moreover, the characters are so
intelligently and carefully elaborated that the letters are neither smaller, larger, nor
thicker than reason or pleasure demand.”
Figure 1. The Gutenberg Bible (c. 1455): sample from the Book of Exodus
Figure 2. Sample of Jenson’s typography (from the Wikipedia entry for ‘Jenson’)
A comparison of a sample of Gutenberg’s Black Letter (Figure 1) with Jenson’s
Venetian Old Style (Figure 2) is instructive. At first glance, the two seem to have
almost nothing in common. The letters look as if they might even represent different
alphabets. Gutenberg’s style is a version of the letters in medieval manuscripts.
Jenson’s is completely different: to a modern reader, it looks uncannily familiar,
because it established typographical principles that are still relevant today. It is
astonishingly, even shockingly modern—a design achievement worthy of the 20
th
-
century Bauhaus at its best. It was the foundation of almost all subsequent type-
founding and design in the Roman alphabet down to the present day, with the
exception of German Fraktur, which owes more to the tradition of Gutenberg and
medieval manuscripts and which, even in 19
th
-century Germany, was recognized to be
unsuitable for printing dictionaries, not least because it is uneconomical in terms of
space on the page and its potentially ambiguous when used in a small size. Typefaces
based on medieval manuscript lettering are designed to be read slowly and
sequentially. Medieval reading was slow. By contrast, the legibility of Jenson’s type
style enabled fast, non-sequential skimming and dipping, of a kind characteristic of
dictionary use.
It takes a modern reader all of thirty seconds to become familiar with the
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idiosyncrasies of Jenson’s Venetian Old Style. These are:
• representation, in certain contexts, of the letters n and m as a superscript bar
over a preceding vowel (suggesting nasalization of the vowel rather a full-
quality consonant)
• two forms of the letter s, long and short, whose uses are contextually
determined
• two short forms of Latin words meaning ‘and’: the symbol ‘&’, which is still
used today in certain contexts, and ‘q:’ for the bound morpheme –que.
In all other respects, Antiqua type styles are recognizably the same as their modern
equivalents. Other great type designers and punch-cutters of 16
th
-century Europe
(Graffo, Bembo, Garamond, Baskerville, and others) would design typographical
symbols that share most of their fundamental characteristics with those of Jenson,
although it has to be said that they do not share the same classic simplicity. Jenson’s
typographical principles have survived unchanged through the centuries and through
various more recent technological revolutions for over 500 years. This is all the more
remarkable when we consider the idiosyncrasies of conventional handwriting styles of
the Renaissance, which require many hours of training in paleography before they can
be read with fluency.
An important aspect, from the point of view of lexicography, of Jenson’s contribution
was that his typographic principles made it possible for printers to put many more
words on the page without sacrificing legibility. This was to be an important
contribution to the herculean lexicographic efforts that were to come. In a big text
(and Renaissance dictionaries were big), more words on the page means fewer pages,
which in turn means a more manageable product.
Fourteen years after Jenson’s death, his printing and publishing business in Venice
was inherited (in 1494), through marriage, by a man who was to play a pivotal role in
the Italian Renaissance. Teobaldo Manucci,
better known as Aldus Manutius (1450-
1515), was a scholar with a passion for Ancient Greek philosophy and classical
literature. Aldus was a man of means as well as scholarship. He devoted himself to
using the technology of typesetting and printing to recover as many classical works as
he could from obscurity and to preventing further losses. He commissioned the
typographer Francesco Griffo to create additional typefaces, including Greek (though
the Greek typefaces are full of cursive features and much less legible than the Roman
ones designed by Jenson). Aldus acquired ancient Greek manuscripts from all over
the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean region and employed Greek-speaking
editors and compositors to collate and edit these manuscripts and get the texts typeset
and printed. Venice was well placed for this activity, as the Venetian Republic during
the 15
th
and 16
th
century held sway politically over some of the islands of Greece
(Naxos, Crete, and the Ionian islands), so he had access to Greek-speaking scholars
and workers.
Another important figure must now be briefly mentioned. In 1508 the Humanist
scholar Erasmus was staying in Venice as a guest of Aldus Manutius. Here, he
compiled his Adagia, a sort of dictionary of quotations from Classical authors. As he
readily acknowledged, he received much help from the scholars and editors in Aldus’s
workshop, including Aldus himself. The Adagia is not merely a collection of
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quotations and proverbs, but also contains discursive articles on certain selected key
words and concepts. It is a source of the lexicographical insistence on supporting
definitions and explanations with citations.
3. Printing in 15th
3. Printing in 15th3. Printing in 15th
3. Printing in 15th-
--
-century England
century Englandcentury England
century England
Printing was introduced to England in the 1470s by William Caxton. Caxton took up
printing only towards the end of his life; he was an extremely energetic man with
many other business, artistic, and literary interests: a highly respected and successful
merchant as well as a writer, translator, printer, and publisher. After a period spent
living and working in Bruges and elsewhere, he established himself as an importer of
velvet, silk, and other luxurious fabrics, eventually rising to be governor of the
Company of Merchant Adventurers of London. It was not until 1475-76, when he was
over sixty years old, that he established the business on which his present-day fame
rests. He set up a printing press, at first in Bruges and later in London, in imitation of
one that he had observed in Cologne. The output of Caxton's press was prolific.
Among its most famous publications were Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Mallory's
Morte d'Arthur.
Caxton and his business partner Wynkyn de Worde (an Alsatian whom he had met in
Bruges) did not publish any dictionaries apart from a very modest French-English
glossary. The earliest printed dictionary in England was the Promptorium Parvulorum
(‘Young People’s Storeroom’), an English-Latin word list, printed in 1499 by Richard
Pynson. This work had been compiled about sixty years earlier by Galfridus Anglicus
(alias Galfridus Grammaticus ‘Geoffrey the Grammarian’), a Dominican friar who
lived in Norfolk. Its 10,000 entries (words and phrases) had already been laboriously
copied out by hand several times—the only means of dissemination possible until the
invention of printing—before Pynson set it in type and printed it (Figure 3). Both
Caxton and Pynson used type styles that were based on those of Gutenberg. Neither
had been able to learn about or benefit from the streamlined, economical character of
contemporary Venetian typography. Indeed, principles of typographical clarity
analogous to those of 15
th
century Venice were not really introduced into England for
another 300 years. Over a hundred years after Pynson, Cawdrey’s printer still used
black-letter type for glosses, and English typography of the 17
th
and 18
th
centuries is
full of unnecessary flourishes and ligatures. It looks cluttered and fussy compared
with the clean lines and legibility of Jenson and Aldus Manutius.
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Figure 3. Extract from Pynson’s printing of Promptorium Parvulorum, 1499.
4. The Estienne family of Paris and Geneva
4. The Estienne family of Paris and Geneva4. The Estienne family of Paris and Geneva
4. The Estienne family of Paris and Geneva
If we compare the first printing of Promptorium Parvulorum (1499) with the Latin
dictionaries compiled, edited, and printed in Paris by Robert Estienne family in the
1530s, we see a quantum leap in both technology and scholarship. Promptorium
Parvulorum is a practical work for students struggling to express themselves in Latin,
i.e. for encoding use, printed in heavy black-letter type. By contrast, the
Dictionarium, seu Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (1531) of Robert Estienne is a work for
scholarly use by people reading the Latin texts of classical antiquity, many of which
Estienne also printed. In his authoritative study of Renaissance lexicography,
Considine (2008) argues that preservation of “heritage” was an important part of the
goal of Renaissance lexicographers such as the Estiennes. Early lexicographers were
not merely producing practical tools for language learners or translators; they were
contributing to the Renaissance programme of preserving and indeed reviving the
classical heritage.
The type of Estienne’s Dictionarium was designed, cut, and cast by Claude
Garamond, one of several type cutters with whom Estienne had a business
relationship. Garamond’s elegant type style owes more to the Venetian Antiqua
school of typography than to Gutenberg, though it is embellished by the occasional
flourish which Jenson would surely have regarded as superfluous. Nevertheless,
Estienne’s Dictionarium is both a work of scholarship and a triumph of elegance in
the printer’s art—an aesthetic pleasure to peruse as well as a scholarly inventory of
the vocabulary of classical literature. This is also true, though to a lesser extent, of the
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (1572), which was compiled, edited, printed, and
published forty years later by Robert's son Henri Estienne II.
If we look at an entry from Estienne’s 1531 Dictionarium—I have chosen, more or
less at random, the entry for conclamo (Figure 4)—we can see immediately that this is
not a bilingual French-Latin dictionary. It is a monolingual dictionary of Latin, with a
French gloss (in this case, “Crier”) appended. The rest of text is taken up with
morphological information, a monolingual gloss in Latin (“simul clamare”), and a
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great wealth of citations from Latin authors, on the basis of which Estienne offers
collocational norms, some of which are glossed or explained in Latin (not French).
Figure 4. R. Estienne, Dictionarium, 1531, entry for ‘conclamo’
The French glosses in Estienne’s Thesaurus Linguae Latinae play a comparatively
minor role. More striking is the large number of citations and references. Estienne
was concerned not merely to say what the meaning of each Latin word is, but to
record where the word is used in the classical Latin texts that he had available to him.
This is in essence very similar to the lexicographical principles adopted for the
academy dictionaries of the 17
th
century to the present day.
Estienne’s work is part of the true foundation of European lexicography. Following
Starnes (1963), we may regard Robert Estienne’s Latin dictionary of 1531 as a
seminal work, but this does not mean that it had no predecessors or that he and his
team of lexicographers were working in a vacuum. He was part of a highly productive
accretive continuum of European lexicography. Other Latin dictionaries had appeared
even earlier, in particular that of Ambrogio Calepino (1502). It is clear that the
scholars in Estienne’s workshop made use of these works, just as OED built on the
foundations laid by Johnson (1755) and other earlier lexicographers.
Among the factors that distinguish Estienne’s 1531 dictionary from its predecessors
are its meticulous scholarship, the systematic inclusion of citations from works of
classical literature (many of which were also printed by Estienne), a concern with
semantic differentiation and phraseology, and reliance on readable typography.
There can be no doubt that Considine (2008) is right that the main purpose of Robert
Estienne’s 1531 Dictionarium was to contribute to the preservation of the heritage of
9
classical literature, and the same is true of the equally ambitious and equally
monumental Thesaurus Graecae Linguae, published by his son Henri Estienne in
1572 (Figure 5).
Figure 5. H. Estienne, Extract from Thesaurus Graecae Linguae, 1572.
Two other important dictionaries of Robert Estienne show a different side of this great
lexicographer. As we have seen, his main concern in 1531 was to cater to the needs of
scholars and literati by preserving the heritage of the classical Latin language. But he
was also sensitive to the needs of more humble students and language learners. The
Dictionnaire francoislatin of 1539 (Figure 6) is a practical work explicitly aimed at
students wishing to express themselves in Latin. A noticeable feature is the large
number of idiomatic French phrases for which Latin equivalents are offered. For
example, l’ordre et collocation des mots is glossed as ‘verborum constructio’. Robert
Estienne placed considerable emphasis on phraseology and context: it is perhaps not
too fanciful to believe that he would have been sympathetic to modern theories of
collocation and construction grammar.
Figure 6. R. Estienne, Dictionnaire francoislatin, 1539, entry for ‘mot’
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A complementary (and equally practical) work published by Robert Estienne in 1552
is the Dictionarium Latino-Gallicum (Figure 7). This is not a revised version of his
1536 work. Instead, it is a practical guide whose aim is to help students decode the
meanings of Latin words and Latin texts into their native French. As can be seen in
Figure 8, there are many more French glosses on the Latin words and phrases than in
the 1536 work (though they are still, by modern standards, sparse). The ‘principle
parts’ of verbs are given at the start of the entry (“conduco, conducis, conduxi,
conductum, conducere”), which is helpful for both decoding and encoding use.
Citations from literature have been replaced by short phrases, often with a gloss. The
authority of a classical author for phraseology is invoked in abbreviated form, but
generally without a full citation. Thus, the Latin phrase ‘nimium magno conducere’ is
included on the authority of Cicero and glossed as ‘Acheter trop cher’, i.e. in English,
‘to buy too dear’. This is information of a kind that is particularly useful for students
learning to read and understand Latin texts, as opposed to scholars who were already
fluent in Latin. It is also, coincidentally, of potential interest to modern scholars
studying the cultural persistence of conventional metaphors and idiomatic phrases in
European languages going back to classical Latin.
Figure 7. R. Estienne, Dictionarium Latino-Gallicum, 1552, entry for ‘conduco’.
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Trench (1858) rightly describes lexicographers as “the inventory clerks of language”,
but these great Renaissance lexicographers were very much more than mere inventory
clerks. They were scholars, compilers, definers, printers, and publishers. The Estienne
firm was founded by Henri Estienne (c. 1460-1520), who had married the widow of a
printer in 1502 and expanded the business. Three sons and two grandsons became
printers. There can be no doubt that Robert Estienne (1503-59) was the greatest of the
family, even though his son Henri II was to successfully tackle the even more
challenging task of compiling a scholarly dictionary of classical Greek. Part of the
greatness of Robert lies in his evident concern for students as well as scholars and the
range of the different dictionaries that he and his staff compiled and published, a
range that would have been quite impractical without the recent innovations in the
technology of printing and typesetting.
In addition to his remarkable achievements in scholarly and practical lexicography,
Robert Estienne also ran a successful printing business, publishing editions of major
classical texts and other works. According to his biography (Armstrong, 1954), he
printed and published on average 18 books a year in Paris, as well as undertaking his
massive lexicographic projects. He ran a lively and polyglot workshop. According to
his son Henri II, “There sat down to table daily a staff of ten assorted nationalities,
together with family and guests, all speaking Latin, including the servants”
(Armstrong, 1954: 15). She estimates, on the basis of contemporary records, that in its
heyday the firm employed a staff of 50 (2 type-founders, 18 compositors, 5 proof-
readers, 21 printers, 3 apprentices, and one shop boy), in addition to the master
himself and his family. Estienne was on intimate terms with the greatest Parisian
scholars and intellectuals of his day. He styled himself “printer to the king” but
eventually, as an outspoken Protestant, in or before 1550 he found it prudent to
remove himself to Geneva, where his output dropped to about six books a year.
5. Polyglot and bilingual dictionaries during the
5. Polyglot and bilingual dictionaries during the 5. Polyglot and bilingual dictionaries during the
5. Polyglot and bilingual dictionaries during the
Renaissance
RenaissanceRenaissance
Renaissance
The most important and innovative bilingual dictionary of the early 16
th
century was
compiled in English. It is Palsgrave’s large and ambitious Lesclaircissement de la
langue francoyse (1530). Palsgrave had been tutor at the English court to Henry
VIII’s sister Princess Mary, who in 1515 became Queen of France. His guide to the
French language is not only a bilingual dictionary but also a grammar. The dictionary
part contains 18,890 English-French equivalents. Black Letter type is used for
English, Antiqua for French. The arrangement is alphabetical by part of speech; i.e.,
each part of speech is given a separate “table”. The table of substantives consists
mostly of single-word equivalents, with disambiguation of polysemous words, e.g.
there are two entries for meale: meale of corne is glossed as ‘farine’, meale of meate
is glossed as ‘repast’. The table of verbs pays more attention to phraseology (see
Figure 8). Each sense of each English verb is first embedded in an English phrase (or
given an English gloss), and then the target word and/or the phrase as a whole is
translated into French.
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Figure 8. Extract from Palsgrave’s Lesclaircissement de la langue francoyse (1530)
Palsgrave was a true comparative linguist as well as a pioneering lexicographer.
However, rather surprisingly, his fine example was not followed: his work did not
serve as a model for other bilingual dictionaries of vernacular languages—at least, not
for another sixty years. Instead, the standard lexicographical tool used for translation
during the Renaissance was a polyglot dictionary based on Latin. It is time to examine
how this came about.
By 1490, many cities in Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands had a printing press,
many of which produced dictionaries, vocabularies, and word lists of one sort or
another—some in thematic order, others in more or less exact alphabetical order.
Most of these were monolingual Latin dictionaries, the demand for them reflecting the
status of Latin as the language of knowledge, culture, and international
communication. The first Greek-Latin lexicon was compiled and published by a
Carmelite monk, Giovanni Crastone of Piacenza (1497).
As for vernacular languages, there blossomed in the early 16
th
century a fine crop of
monolingual Italian dictionaries, as described by Alonge (2006). This is a clear
indication of the confidence of Italians in their language as a literary medium rivaling
Latin, distinguishing it in status from other vernaculars of Renaissance Europe.
Surprisingly, though, there were few bilingual dictionaries of vernacular languages at
this stage. Everything was mediated through Latin, which functioned as a sort of
interlingua. As shown by Kramer (2006) and Schoonheim and Pijnenburg (2006), in
the German-speaking lands and the Netherlands, early Latin-German and German-
Latin lexicographic works appeared, notably Van der Schueren (1477), Dasypodius
(1535-36), and Maaler (1561). The complex relationships among European
languages of this period are well described in Burke (2002).
The seminal work in the development of European bilingual lexicography (or rather,
multilingual lexicography) was the Dictionarium of Ambrogio Calepino. Calepino’s
original edition (1502) was a Latin vocabulary, with glosses in Latin supported by
13
citations, together with encyclopedic entries for the figures of classical mythology. In
a second edition, glosses in Italian and French were added. By a process of accretion,
the vocabularies of other languages, starting with Greek and Hebrew, were gradually
added to successive editions of Calepino’s original. In the words of Fried (2007: 231),
“it evolved into the first polyglot dictionary.” By 1580, a dozen different editions,
containing glosses in up to eleven different languages, all attributed to Calepino, were
in print, published in locations as far apart as Reggio nell’Emilia, Venice, Paris,
Strasbourg, Hagenau, Lyon, and Rome. In Paris alone, five competing editions
appeared between 1524 and 1541. The 1573 edition printed and published in Venice
includes the following comment in its front matter, quoted and translated by Freed:
In hac postrema editione, ut hoc dictionarium commodius exteris nationibus
inservire possit, singulis vocibus latinis italicas, gallicas, & hispanicas
interpretationes inseri curavimus.
In this latest edition, in order that this dictionary might more fully serve foreign
nations, we have taken care to insert Italian, French, and Spanish definitions
among the lone Latin entries.
By this time, of course, Ambrogio Calepino himself (1450-1510) was long dead and
his book had become common property. Stathi (2006) argues that the popularity of
the many ‘Calepinos’ was due, not to its etymologies, but to its explanations of
meanings and to the inclusion of examples of word use. The extraordinarily complex
bibliographical history of this work and its derivatives was traced by Labarre (1975).
This shows that multilingual editions really began to take off in the 1550s (Figure 9);
by the 1580s it had come to include lexical items in up to 11 languages—not only
Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, French, and Spanish, but also barbarous and outlandish
tongues such as German, English, Polish, and Hungarian. By the end of the century, a
Latin-Portuguese-Japanese ‘Calepino’ had appeared, supporting the missionary work
of the Portuguese Jesuits who were at that time seeking to Christianize Japan. It has
been said that Calepino’s work is deficient in scholarly precision. Moreover, these
polyglot works are great, cumbersome things, not suitable for carrying around and not
particularly user-friendly. Nevertheless, these were the principal works that served the
practical translation needs of Europeans in the 16
th
century.
14
Figure 9: Extract from a 1550 Basel edition of Calepino
Not only did Calepino’s work become the common property of Europeans in many
different editions; Calepino’s very surname also passed into the vocabulary of Italian,
French, English, and other languages. In the 16
th
and 17
th
centuries, Italian calepino
and English calepin were used as generic terms for a dictionary. In French, calepin
was further extended to mean a notebook or a compilation of rare and unusual
linguistic facts, and was used in various colloquial expressions such as mettez cela sur
votre calepin ‘add that to your calepin’. Watson (1908) and Starnes (1955) showed
that a ‘calepin’ was a widely available—and widely used—resource in schools and
universities throughout England in the 16
th
century. Calepine was also adopted by
Edmund Spenser as a proper name for an allegorical character in the Faerie Queene,
the significance of which is discussed by Fried (2007) in an article that contains a
remarkably illuminating account of Renaissance lexicography.
There were some exceptions to all this polyglottalism. Caxton printed a short,
practical French-English vocabulary in 1480, but this is a comparatively minor work.
An Italian-German thematic dictionary, Introito e porta, was compiled by Adam von
Rottweil as early as 1477. It stands at the head of a long tradition, comprising 89
separate publications between 1477 and 1636.
6. Dictionaries in 16th
6. Dictionaries in 16th6. Dictionaries in 16th
6. Dictionaries in 16th-
--
-century England
century Englandcentury England
century England
The Renaissance dictionaries discussed in the preceding sections bore rapid fruit in
England, in the first place as a source for the first printed Latin-English dictionary in
England, the Dictionary of Sir Thomas Elyot (1538) (Figure 10). Unlike Promptorium
15
Parvulorum, this was a work for decoding use, as was its most important successor,
the Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (1587), compiled and printed by
Thomas Thomas, printer to the University of Cambridge (Figure 11). This latter work
enjoyed tremendous success for several decades. It is admirably succinct and
practical. The English glosses in it are full and informative. As printer to the
University of Cambridge, Thomas Thomas was well aware of the needs of students
and was at pains to provide them with help in the form of systematic but succinct
glosses in their own native tongue.
Typographically, Elyot’s work is very obviously indebted to the medieval tradition of
Pynson, Caxton, and Gutenberg, whereas Thomas’s work of fifty years later is very
much more legible. It owes much to the Renaissance typographical tradition of
Estienne, Aldus Manutius, and Jenson—though it must be said that it seems sadly
debased compared with the beautiful clean lines of Jenson’s original Venetian Old
Style. Neither the Parisians of the 16
th
century nor the Elizabethans in England could
resist a flourish—literary or typographical.
Figure 10. Extract from the Dictionarium of Sir Thomas Elyot, 1538
Figure 11. Extract from Thomas’ Dictionarium Linguae Latinae et Anglicanae, 1589
Finally, in this brief survey of dictionaries before Cawdrey, we come to the evolution
of bilingual dictionaries proper. Two such works are well known to students of
Shakespeare: John Florio's Italian and English Dictionary of 1598 and John
16
Minsheu’s Dictionarie in Spanish and English of 1599. Both of these are practical
works for the emerging modern world, designed as aids for translation between
contemporary languages. Minsheu’s work was an expanded version of an earlier
work called Bibliotheca Hispanica (1591), compiled by by Richard Percyvall. Along
with Palsgrave for English-French, these are the precursors of modern bilingual
dictionaries.
Figure 12. Extract from Florio, 1598
17
Figure 13. Extract from Minsheu, 1599
Minsheu was to go on to compile The Guide into Tongues (Ductor in linguas, 1617),
an ambitious polyglot work in eleven languages. It would no doubt be an interesting
research topic to determine the debt of Minsheu to Calepino. This, however, lies
outside the period and the scope of the present study.
Despite the efforts of Palsgrave (1530), It was not until the 1590s that the
European intelligentsia realized that it was not necessary to use Latin as an
interlingua or reference point, on the model of the multilingual dictionaries
published under the name of Calepino, in order to translate words and phrases of
one vernacular language into those of another. The first French-German /
German-French dictionary was published in 1596 by Levinus Hulsius in
Nürnberg. He also compiled the first Italian-German / German-Italian
dictionary. Other bilingual dictionaries of vernacular languages were to follow
thick and fast during the 17
th
century.
These dictionaries contributed to the internationalization of European culture, making
the literature and culture of countries such as Italy and France accessible to speakers
of remoter northern languages such as English.
7. Conclusion and a modern analogue
7. Conclusion and a modern analogue 7. Conclusion and a modern analogue
7. Conclusion and a modern analogue
In this paper I have identified three themes in Renaissance lexicography: the
preservation and dissemination of the classical heritage; the creation of practical tools
18
for students of Latin and Greek; and the emergence of bilingual dictionaries as
practical aids for translation among vernacular languages. None of this would have
been possible without the invention of printing technology and the creation of type
fonts that make economic and elegant use of space on the page.
I have argued that histories of English lexicography such as Landau (2001) need to
pay more attention to the formative influences of the great Latin dictionaries of the
16th century. Studies by scholars such as Armstrong, Bately, and Considine provide
an important perspective. A curious fact is that much 16th-century European
lexicography used Latin as an interlingua, so that it took several decades for genuine
bilingual lexicography to emerge, apart from a few pioneering works such as
Palsgrave (1530).
A modern analogue suggests itself, namely that of the development of computer
technology in the second half of the 20th century, which could be (or should be)
having an impact on present-day lexicography that is as profound as was the
development of printing technology in the 15th century. The full possibilities are only
just beginning to be worked out. There are at least four aspects:
1. Evidence. Just as the Renaissance programme of collecting, printing, and
publishing the texts of classical antiquity led to major, technologically
innovative dictionaries of Greek and Latin, so the advent of electronic corpora
and internet search engines have opened up possibilities for new lexicographic
descriptions of phraseology and meaning in contemporary languages.
2. Resources. For Renaissance lexicographers, newly printed copies of
classical texts served as resources to be quarried for the lexis of Latin and
Greek. At present, a plethora of electronic resources, of variable quality and
accuracy, for NLP and AI applications are being developed for modern
languages. One only needs to look at the Global WordNet Programme, to see
an example. It remains to be seen who will be the Robert Estienne of the 21
st
century and how he or she will present the lexicons of modern languages for a
new generation of users, which will include machines as well as humans.
3. Compilation. In the 16
th
century, the index card was invented, and used to
compile lexicographical information and sort data into alphabetical order.
Now, the computer has freed lexicographers from the tyranny of alphabetical
order.
4. Dissemination. The invention of printing enabled the rapid reproduction of
large numbers of copies of large, complex texts in legible print. This was to
be an essential component of lexicography for the ensuing 500 years. At the
present time, this whole technology is being superseded by on-line
dissemination of information. The waters are muddy and a business model has
not yet clearly emerged. But the potential is tremendous. It has hardly begun
to be tapped.
Acknowledgements
AcknowledgementsAcknowledgements
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to John Considine and Gilles-Maurice de Schryver for comments on
an earlier draft of this paper. Thanks are also due to Anne Urbschat for help in
19
the selection and preparation of the illustrations.
Illustrations of original printed entries from the Estienne dictionaries cited are shown
by courtesy of the Librarians of All Souls College, Oxford and Christ Church,
Oxford. For electronic versions of Renaissance dictionaries, acknowledgment is due
to the magnificent Lexicon of Modern English (LEME) database of the University of
Toronto: http://leme.library.utoronto.ca/
Research for this paper was funded in part by the Czech Ministry of Education (MSM
0021620838) and the Czech Science Foundation (P406/2010/0875) as part of a series
of studies in lexicography at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of the
Charles University in Prague.
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