John Considine. Dictionaries of Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage.

Abstract

We live in a time in which ‘humanistic’ and ‘philological’ are more relics than even ossified reliquaries. Why should anyone but a historian of languages or lexicography have interest in the recovery and collection of inscriptions of early modern Europe? Lexicography is more than the sum of all lexicographers and all dictionaries compiled and inscribed or being compiled and about to be inscribed. John Considine tells us in the opening pages of Dictionaries of Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage that ‘this book originates in an attempt to understand the association between dictionaries and heroic narratives.’ (p. 4) Dictionaries in the European chain of texts are artifacts of inheritance: genealogical (for example, Robert and Henri Estienne), bibliographical, and material (including ownership of land, perhaps unexpectedly). And thus, we begin to understand the relationships of a seemingly vanished heroic age revealed contemporaneously as an heroic heritage and the lexicographer, the collector and transmitter, as ‘heroic in his own right’. As a scholar who has ample experience as a lexicographer, Considine attempts to argue that dictionaries are not only the products of exacting and scholarly research. He makes the case for expanding the scope of how we understand histories of lexicography to include ‘new contexts in intellectual and cultural history’. Thus, in a few pages he gently chides lexicographers and meta-lexicographers: the former for narrowly protecting their high seriousness and authoritative relevancy (‘… they were painstakingly engaged in exact and fully documented scholarly research into language …’) by having ‘misgivings’ that ‘many dictionaries can be read as … works of the imagination’, and, the latter, especially their histories of lexicography, for being in some cases ‘notably impoverished by a failure to look beyond dictionaries at the related works contemporary with them.’ (pp. 4-5)