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Reviews1 69 John Palsgrave as Renaissance Linguist. A Pioneer in Vernacular Language Description. Gabriele Stein. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. ix + 511. $145. John Palsgrave's Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse 1530 (LLF) is the first description of the French language that has any claim to completeness. More than a thousand pages long, it covers pronunciation, morphology , syntax, and the lexicon extensively. None of the works before it in any vernacular is comparable, and it was some time before any approached it again. LLF is clearly the work of a scholar who combined intellect and industry with unending curiosity. Gabriele Stein's meticulous and richly detailed study, a model of scholarship that will not soon be equaled, accords this masterpiece and its author the respect they deserve. The book is divided into eleven chapters, covering biographical detail, lexicographic method, and the material Palsgrave chose to include in his dictionary . To highlight Palsgrave's originality, Stein has conducted impressive original research on Palsgrave's predecessors (Balbus, Hugutio, the Promptorium parvulorum or Medulla grammatices [1499], Hortus vocabulorum [1500], Catholicon Anglicum [1483], etc.). As Stein frequently reminds us, these earlier works all linked a vernacular to Latin, a language with a long tradition of grammatical and lexicographic studies. Palsgrave linked two vernaculars, neither of which had been studied in any depth before him. His innovative and unprecedented work on two vernaculars is his most astonishing accomplishment. Chapter 1, "John Palsgrave: Clerk, Royal Schoolmaster, and Chaplain" ( 1-36) , is a biographical sketch that expands greatly upon the best previous account , found in Carver (1937). Particularly interesting is Stein's analysis of illustrative sentences from entries in LLF to illuminate Palsgrave's personal circumstances . In chapter 2, "Lesclarcissement: Composition, Production and Structure " (37-78), Stein describes the preparation and publication of LLF. An enlightening discussion of the printing trade explains why there are so few extant copies of the dictionary and why no second edition ever appeared. The production details are important: apparently Palsgrave did not have enough time to revise the proofs, a fact that often best explains a confusing entry, for instance , the one under Ishrive (333). Although this part of the book sometimes lapses into idle speculation, for example, about alternative explanations for the absence of French equivalents for some words (54), it is nonetheless always interesting. The section on structure treats Palsgrave's phonology, morphology , and syntax. As Stein focuses on Palsgrave's lexicographic work, this area is less thoroughly treated and lacks the depth of contextualization found elsewhere . (Reidenbaugh [1997] supplements Stein well in the topics that are not strictly lexicographic.) Chapter 3, "Linguistic Provenance: What are the Languages Palsgrave is Describing?" (79-123), covers the types of English and French Palsgrave included in his dictionary and his awareness of variation over time and across re- 170Reviews gions. Here Stein relies heavily on general surveys, necessarily superficial, and the results are sometimes disappointing. The subsections on "The Emergence of the Standard Form in French" and "French and Its Regional Forms" accept the existence of "francien," although Bergounioux (1989) and others have demonstrated that 19th- century historical linguistics created it to support aJacobin history of the French language. Similarly, when she cites the Statute of Pleading (1362) as "a decisive step ... to restore English in the law courts" (90) , she fails to note that the statute itself was written in French and that officially French remained the language of legal pleading in England until 1731. These quibbles aside, Stein's detailed analysis of dialectal features in orthographic treatises performs a great service. In chapter 4, "The Word List" (124-73), Stein describes the ordering of words in LLF (alphabetical or semantic according to the part of speech) and compares the coverage of Palsgrave's word lists with the Promptorium parvulorum and the Catholicon Anglicum. In the course of the former discussion, she makes extremely interesting and pertinent comments about the utility of Palsgrave's ordering scheme, comparing it to that of modern dictionaries (146-47). In the second, her innovative use of two types of comparison, by alphabetical order and by semantic class, reveals areas in which Palsgrave's knowledge of French was weak. Chapter 5, "Literary Citations" (174-93), further...

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