Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800

A comprehensive account of dictionaries during a key period in their development, when they were compiled in academies across Europe.

John Considine (Author)

9781107071124, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 July 2014

266 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 1.8 cm, 0.52 kg

'Rarely does one feel it's a privilege to read a scholarly work, but when I finished the last sentence of John Considine's Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800, I felt that privilege - I felt intellectual satisfaction and a humane connection to the subject I had not imagined on opening the book - and knew that I would soon read the whole book again, with yet more pleasure and benefit than in the first instance. Though a compact book, [it] is profound intellectual and cultural history, as well as essential history of lexicography, brilliantly executed. Considine manages to tell a story about a forest without losing sight of the very trees without which the forest would be merely an idea, rather than a historical reality, and he does so with remarkable - and characteristic - intellectual perspective and narrative dexterity.' Michael Adams, Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America

This is the first unified history of the large, prestigious dictionaries of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, compiled in academies, which set out to glorify living European languages. The tradition began with the Vocabolario degli Accademici della Crusca (1612) in Florence and the Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise (1694) in Paris, and spread across Europe - to Germany, Spain, England, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Russia - in the eighteenth century, engaging students of language as diverse as Leibniz, Samuel Johnson, and Catherine the Great. All the major academy and academy-style dictionaries of the period up to 1800, published and unpublished, are discussed in a single narrative, bridging national and linguistic boundaries, to offer a history of lexicography on a European scale. Like John Considine's Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2008), this study treats dictionaries both as physical books and as ambitious works of the human imagination.

1. Introduction
2. The beginnings of the academy tradition: the Vocabolario degli accademici della Crusca
3. The making of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie, and its seventeenth-century rivals
4. The Dictionnaire de l'Académie françoise from its publication to the end of the eighteenth century
5. The Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft and its offshoots in Germany and Denmark from the 1640s to the mid-eighteenth century
6. The academy tradition from the seventeenth century to 1750: England, Brandenburg / Prussia, and Spain
7. Samuel Johnson and Johann Christoph Adelung
8. The continuing academy tradition from 1751 to 1800: the United Provinces, Russia, Portugal, Denmark, and Sweden
9. Afterword: the year 1800 as a turning point
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Publishing industry & book trade [KNTP], Literature: history & criticism [DS], Literature & literary studies [D]