Chaucer in Early English Dictionaries, vol. 18 (review)

Reviews173 which the OED falls short. A score of "100%" would indicate that all the information on first citations had been reported; the actual ARR scores that Schäfer found are: Shakespeare 93.1%; Nashe 63.1%; Malory 50.0%; and Wyatt 42.3%. On the basis of these figures, he estimates a possible "96,000 potential antedatings" in the works read for the OED, and, further, that 30% of these would involve a revision in antedatings by more than fifty years. These findings, obviously enough, point to the magnitude of the additional work that needs to be done if "an accurate picture of the growth of the English language is to be achieved" (p. 54). Though incidentally a critique of OED editorial practices (and of studies based upon OED chronology such as Finkenstaedt 's Ordered Profusion), Schäfer's book, like Trench's is primarily valuable as a stimulus to future scholarship. It is much to be welcomed. Richard W. Bailey The University of Michigan Johan Kerling, Chaucer in Early English Dictionaries, vol. 18. Leiden: Germanic and Angustie Studies of the University of Leiden, 1979. Johan Kerling's Chaucer in Early English Dictionaries is a study of the influence of Thomas Speght's glossaries to his editions of Chaucer (1598 and 1602) on the tradition of labeling "old words" in English dictionaries, from the beginnings of English lexicography to Nathan Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary of 1721. Kerling divides his lexicographers into two ranks—those (Bullokar, Cockeram, Phillips, and Skinner) whose works belong to the "direct tradition" by virtue of their borrowing directly from Speght's glossaries, and those of the "indirect tradition," who borrowed from the first group. The raw material for his study is, Kerling states, "limited," consisting as it does of lists of words marked as "old" in one or more of the dictionaries in question. During the course of the book, however, the reader becomes convinced that there is quite enough material to justify a book-length study of this minor strain in the history of English lexicography, but not so much as to prevent the presentation of a great deal of it hi commendably useful appendices. Kerling demonstrates by citing references to Chaucer in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that interest in Chaucer was lively, but that much of Chaucer's language had become incomprehensible to the average reader. Speght's glossaries supplied at once a key to Chaucer's vocabulary and a list of words for the later use of lexicographers which, because of its source, established the close relation between "old" and "Chaucerian" words. Spenser glossaries were, Kerling shows, similarly used, so that "old," "Chaucerian," and "Spenserian" became three of the labels for obsolete or archaic words. With each list Kerling's procedure is to establish the sources of the old words and to answer a varying group of relevant questions. By examining marked entries and definitions with relation to the lexicographical tools at the author's disposal, Kerling is able to show, for instance, that almost all the words labeled "old" in Bullokar's English Expositor (1616) came from Speght; or, in a more complicated situation, that Speght is the most important source of the old words in Stephen Skinner's Etymologicon Linguae Anglicanae 174Roy R. Barkley (1671) and, through Skinner, of old words in the next "generation" of dictionaries . Until the old word tradition died out in the eighteenth century at the advent of new concepts of dictionary-making, Speght was, Kerling shows, the most important single influence on that tradition. Indeed, the Speght glossaries account for fifty percent or so of the old words in the indirectly influenced dictionaries. The questions which guide Kerling's discussion, usually implicit rather than verbalized, are questions relative to the lexicographer's practice and the history of words: Did the dictionary-maker mark old words? With what words or symbols did he label them? Why did he label them—as a warning or as a means of demonstrating knowledge and conveying mere information? Why did he label a word in one edition and drop the label in the next? Or label a word unmarked in his source? Or remove a label from...