Coming to Terms: Thomas Elyot's Definitions and the Particularity of Human Letters

I. Definitions

Once upon a time in early sixteenth-century England there was no dictionary. There were some incomplete Latin-English lexicons like the Medulla Grammatica (the “marrow” or “kernel” of grammar), compiled in the early fifteenth century. And there was an abundance of schoolboy prompt-books, like the popular Promptorium parvulorum, little more than English-to-Latin word-lists that enabled pupils struggling at “making Latins” to find the right Latin word for their translations. But there was no magisterial resource with the intellectual authority and cultural centrality that works like the OED would obtain in modern culture or that the Stephanus’s Greek-Latin dictionary would find in learned circles of the Renaissance. It is against this lack, then, that one must recall the publication of the dictionary in Henrician England—the publication of the book that gave this resource work its name in English, Sir Thomas Elyot’s Dictionary of 1538, the first full-scale Latin-English lexicon. A powerful minister, Thomas Cromwell, Elyot’s patron throughout his career, plays an important part in the inaugural scene of the Dictionary, as does his king, Henry VIII, whose vanity about his learning is well documented. Like the publication of the Great Bible or the royal prescription of Lyly’s Grammar, the emergence of Elyot’s Dictionary possesses some of the elements of Henrician cultural stagecraft that position the royal court as an almost mythical source of learning and wisdom, magically supplying every want of a grateful nation. And one might indeed plausibly argue that like the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dictionaries, Elyot’s Dictionary finds in linguistic stratification a means of encoding social hierarchy. As Allon White comments, “The dictionary embodies an implicit hierarchy of language and produces a linguistic environment which, taken together, powerfully establish the `high’ language over against all other registers, dialects, and sociolects.” 1 Indeed, one might well hold that Elyot’s Dictionary, along with Lyly’s royally sanctioned grammar, helped to establish the schoolroom as a new cultural field for instituting royal absolutism.

But Elyot’s Dictionary also proves finally to be a national institution with a complex and surprising cultural volatility. Even the work of establishing a clear linguistic hierarchy in the studia humanitatis, for example, becomes a scene of cultural cross-purposes. The editions and revisions of Elyot’s Dictionary provided a model for the Latin-English lexicon as new norms for both languages and new relations between them were negotiated through the religious and pedagogical “re-formations” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Dictionary regulated the professional discourses of humanist Latin against the Latin of the schools (a bilingualism within professional Latin). 2 And yet the Dictionary inevitably also worked backwards (as a resource for neoclassical uses for English words or for Latinate neologisms). It enabled and regulated the emerging high uses of English, undermining the primacy of the humanist Latin it also established in a larger cultural heteroglossalia.

The political and ideological work of the Dictionary is equally circuitous. My hope here is to explore the shifting and intractable shapes of cultural difference that circumscribe works like Elyot’s Dictionary that proceed from and from without the courtly center of influence and legitimate royal power. I use the terms “difference” and “circumscribe” in distinction to “subversion,” “resistance,” or “transgression,” terms whose uses trouble cultural historiography. Because power is relational and contingent, rather than essential, any inquiry into the multiple and heterogeneous discourses that were producing the Tudor state must acknowledge how these discourses and the subjects producing them are the confused site for the play of differences among competing interests and institutions: gender, kinship, status, faction, religious sectarianism, regionalism, trade, profession. Historians must be able to transcribe the past in terms that suggest the cultural circuits of a continuous structuration as discourses are produced through the ongoing play of difference in the material agency of subjects.

At times, historiography will attend to the movements of people inscribed in large social formations, writing over the particularities of individual acts in order to demonstrate a given argument legible in the...