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Reviewed by:
  • Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer by Gabriele Stein
  • Marjorie Rubright (bio)
Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer by Gabriele Stein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Pp. viii + 436. £75.00. ISBN 978-0-19-968319-2

Gabriele Stein’s ten-chapter study, Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer, explores the first work within the history of English lexicography to be called a “dictionary”: The Dictionary of syr Thomas Eliot knyght (1538). To read Elyot’s Latin–English dictionary, Stein contends, is to enter a world where entertainment and edification are entwined, where the lexicographer-as-guide establishes a personal relationship with his readers, at times playing the role of the eyewitness, revealing what he’s seen with his own eyes, at other times addressing the reader directly in the first person. All along Elyot invites critical assessments, offers recommendations for further reading, admits his doubts, and highlights the difficulties entailed in coming to definitive conclusions. If, in the first edition, Elyot set out the ambitious task of explaining nearly 27,000 senses of Latin words in the English tongue, he did so by imagining his reader a participant in his venture.

A book-length study of Elyot as lexicographer is long overdue, since the critical acknowledgement of his contribution to the development of English vocabulary and idiom has tended to focus on his literary works rather than on his bilingual Latin–English dictionary. Yet Elyot’s Dictionary was an immediate success, offering readers more than its title suggests, as it was also an encyclopedia that endeavored to explain historical events, persons, objects, and the wisdom of classical antiquity. Stein ventures that it was the expanded encyclopedic component of the dictionary that may have sparked the change of title when, after the first edition, the work was renamed Bibliotheca Eliotae: Eliots Librarie (2nd ed. 1542, 3rd ed. 1545). While Elyot was responsible for the revisions and corrections of the first three editions, after his death Thomas Cooper produced three more editions (1548, 1552, 1559), indicating the desirability and timeliness of this resource for sixteenth-century English readers.

In her Introduction, Stein surveys a small handful of influential accounts of the history of the English language, as well as a thin sample of recent work by literary critics, to report both a “lack of familiarity with” and a “practice of ignoring the work done by” sixteenth-century English lexicographers. Here, scholarship that is not primarily about English lexicography is condemned as “superficial and mistaken” in order to underscore Stein’s claim that only a “vague awareness” permeates the [End Page 351] “blind spot” that is sixteenth-century English lexicography. While surely a more generous note might have been struck in doing so, the book makes a timely call for more scholarship addressing the period’s bilingual and multilingual dictionaries for what they can teach us about the history of the English language and the development of early English lexicography. Just how this future work might take shape beyond the scope of single-author case studies, or how it might contribute to recent debates about the stakes of philology in literary and cultural studies, Stein does not speculate. The book is addressed primarily to those interested in the history of English lexicography and history of the English language, as the content and methodology of her ensuing chapters makes evident.

In Chapter 2, Stein identifies the five basic principles guiding Elyot’s practice: first, a search for comprehensiveness, made manifest in his willingness to stop and expand his compilation process when—having worked up to the letter M—he was granted access to the king’s library, effectively multiplying his source texts; second, authentication, the reading of the texts from which lexical items were collected; third, accountability, which entailed Elyot following the established lexicographic practice of indicating his source texts; fourth, a full explanation of the meaning of words; and finally, diligence, which Elyot expressed in terms of both praise and admonition of the work of previous lexicographers.

In Chapter 3, Stein finds that Elyot’s dictionary does not presage the impersonal style that modern dictionaries would come to adopt. Instead, she argues, his first-person address encourages readers to question the limits of...

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