REVIEWS

 

 

Roderick McConchie and Jukka Tyrkkö (Editors). Historical Dictionaries in Their Paratextual Context. 2018, xii + 318 pp. ISBN: 978-3-11-057286-5 (Hardback). Lexicographica. Series Maior 153. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter. Price € 99.95.

This volume of essays examines dictionaries and dictionary-making practices in their broadly-interpreted paratextual context.¹ The term 'paratext', borrowed from literary theory, has been infrequently used in lexicography (e.g. Van Male 2004). As the Editors put it (McConchie and Tyrkkö 2018: vii), "Dictionaries exist in and are abound by a context ... These works have usually been seen as finished, immutable product, without asking how this product was produced, or what its subsequent fate was." They go on to explain that "Reflection on the nature and role of dictionaries raises many questions. Who wrote and compiled dictionaries and why? Who patronized their publication and their authors, financed them, and to whom were they dedicated? How were they set up for printing, advertised, sold, and distributed? What were the conventions of dictionary layout? How did this change over the years? Who bought and read them? What collections did they find their way into, and for what reasons? What is the individual history of individual copies of dictionaries?" The wealth of questions for which reliable, or even tentative, answers are sought is not confined to the traditional field of dictionary criticism (cf. Akasu 2013, Swanepoel 2017). Instead, with its integrative and insightful 'anthropological' approach to historical dictionaries and their compilers, the monograph takes us into a broader area of cultural history, opening new and exciting avenues of research.

The historicity of dictionaries merits a comment. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), alluded to by Michael Adams and discussed by Sarah Ogilvie, remains the only indisputably historical dictionary under scrutiny here. Numerous endeavours compiled in the past, which remain of great interest to historians of lexicography, may also contribute to a better understanding of historical lexicography. To make these sources a legitimate object of study, however, it would be recommended to call them more adequately semi- and quasi-historical dictionaries (Podhajecka 2018: 143, 145).

The preface, introducing the methodological issues behind the topic, is followed by twelve articles, each of which highlights a particular paratextual context in specifically English lexicography. Seija Tiisala's story of Jacob Serenius's trilingual dictionary, Dictionarium Anglo-Svethico-Latinum, is the only exception to the rule. The book closes with the contributors' biographies and a comprehensive index.

The selection of essays opens with Michael Adams's "Reading Trench Reading Richardson," which looks at the possible motivations and reasons for Richard Chenevix Trench's ample annotations of Charles Richardson's New Dictionary of the English Language (1836-37). Adams claims that this is "important evidence of Trench's practice as a lexicographer and dictionary critic," which became a basis not only for Trench's seminal paper, On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries (1857), but also for the OED. It would be facile to refer to the reasoning that emerges from Adams's examination of the subsequent layers of Trench's annotations as a detective story, but a detective story it undoubtedly is, one drawn out brilliantly. I should perhaps offer a minor suggestion: Adams admits to having consulted the fifth edition of Trench's Select Glossary of English Words Used Formerly in Senses Different from Their Present (1879) for comparison, but one may find online all the previous editions.²

Fredric T. Dolezal and Ward J. Risvold's article is dedicated to John Wil-kins's Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language (1668), an ambitious attempt to produce a universal language. It has been considered an important, albeit forgotten, project in the history of linguistics and its component, An Alphabetical Dictionary in the history of lexicography (Dolezal 1985: 1). Dolezal and Risvold examine a group of authors (e.g. William Lloyd), booksellers (e.g. Samuel Gellibrand), and printers (e.g. Thomas Roycroft) in seventeenth-century England in order to identify the most likely candidate to have printed the Essay, that is, Anne Maxwell. In so doing, they demonstrate an impressive knowledge of the London book trade, people associated with it, and events that may have exerted an influence, such as the 1666 Great Fire of London. This contribution offers unique glimpses into the early publishing market, providing evidence hitherto unknown.

M. Victoria Domínguez-Rodríguez and Alicia Rodríguez-Álvarez's contribution, "As Well for the Entertainment of the Curious, as the Information of the Ignorant," looks at variously-titled encyclopedic supplements prefixed or appended to eighteenth-century dictionaries of English. Having taken into account a huge selection of general dictionaries listed in Alston (1966) and included in EEBO, they excluded those without paratexts as largely irrelevant. The remaining list of sixteen dictionaries served as the basis for the study. It may be important to note that Domínguez-Rodríguez and Rodríguez-Álvarez not only explored the educational, informative, or entertaining functions of paratextual elements, but they also provided a working typology of them. This is a solid piece of research based on an accurately applied methodology, which has led the authors to arrive at sound conclusions.

The following essay, "Printed English Dictionaries in the National Library of Russia to the Mid-Seventeenth Century," was written by Olga E. Frolova and Roderick McConchie. They seek to ascertain how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century dictionaries in the holdings of St. Petersburg's library were acquired and from where. Frolova and McConchie present us with brief accounts of the first seventeen dictionaries, from Thomas Cooper's Biblioteca Eliotx ... (1552) to John Rider's Riders Dictionarie, Corrected and Augmented ... (1640), as well as biographies of the dictionary-makers, carefully tracing the provenance of the books through manuscript inscriptions. They succeed in establishing that the works come from a variety of collections, of which that owned by the Polish bibliophiles Andrzej (not Andrzhej) Stanislaw Zaluski and his brother Józef Andrzej Zaluski was the largest.

Giovanni Iamartino's article, '"A Hundred Visions and Revisions': Malone's Annotations to Johnson's Dictionary," deals with a copy of Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English language (1755) annotated throughout by the Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone. Iamartino shows a selection of over five hundred annotations researched thus far in four main categories: new entries and new definitions, added quotations, new or verified etymologies, and miscellaneous notes. The annotations, we are told, need not be perceived as the reflection of Malone's eccentric pastime. On the contrary, they served a practical purpose, which is why many found their way into Henry Todd's revision of Johnson's Dictionary. This is an informative account of the value of annotations in updating and improving lexicographical data.

Roderick McConchie's "The Use of 'Mechanical Reasoning': John Quincy and His Lexicon Physico-Medicum (1719)" applies still another perspective that helps to bring to light another interesting finding. He focuses, within the area of under-researched English medical lexicography (McConchie 2019: 1), on the extent to which the lexicographer's interest might influence his dictionary, treating Quincy and his passion for Newtonian mechanical principles as a test case. In Lexicon Physico-Medicum (1719), McConchie encounters a number of headwords, such as cohesion, energy, particle, vision, and water, that appear unrelated to medical sciences. He then compares the dictionary with later editions and with two editions of Blancard's The Physical Dictionary to verify whether Quincy's innovation exerted an influence on other medical lexicographers.

In "Paratexts and the First Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary: 'Content Marketing' in the Nineteenth Century?," Sarah Ogilvie sets out to discover the links between the creation, content, and context of the OED by looking, on the one hand, at the prefaces and dedications ('peritexts') and, on the other, at archival sources ('epitexts'). She skillfully examines the subsequent prefaces to the fascicles and volumes of the OED and dedications, "a window into the historical and cultural setting," revealing that the editors used prefaces to establish the authority of the dictionary in the eyes of its users, whereas the dedications are indicative of the editors' aspiration to attain prestige and power. Ogilvie weaves threads of evidence into a coherent tapestry, tackling the editors' treatment of World Englishes (see Ogilvie 2013), the contributors to the OED, comparisons between the lexical coverage and that of competitor dictionaries, and aspects of the editorial process. Her research indicates that paratexts, while being a mine of information on the 'hidden' history of the OED, aimed to promote the dictionary's comprehensiveness, scholarly rigour, and prestige.

Rebecca Shapiro's contribution, "The 'Wants' of Women: Lexicography and Pedagogy in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Dictionaries," explores the links between women and works on lexicography and matters educational. Beginning with James Murray's citations on women (his employing women on "various lexicographical projects" is somewhat ambiguous), Shapiro first analyses early modern English dictionaries in relation to women. This is a viable research stance inasmuch as some early lexicographers, including Robert Cawdrey (1604), William Bullokar (1616), Thomas Blount (1656), and John Kersey (1702), targeted women as their primary readership; they were expected to improve their own knowledge of languages as learners and pass it onto their children as teachers. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were a period of burgeoning literacy, which not only granted women better education, but also saw the first female lexicographers, such as Hester Lynch Piozzi and Maria Edgeworth, whose biographies Shapiro also outlines.

In her essay "Claudius Hollyband: A Lexicographer Speaks His Mind," Gabriele Stein, an acclaimed expert on sixteenth-century dictionaries (e.g. Stein 2014), looks at the judgmental descriptions included by Hollyband, a French Huguenot settled in England, in his Dictionarie French and English (1593). Based on a meticulously close reading of the dictionary text, which is her particular area of expertise, Stein provides instances of Hollyband's authorial involvement, entries of an autobiographical nature, and subjective opinions ranging from appreciation to disapproval. They are found in entries related mainly to food and drink, sex (including homosexuality), and the Catholic Church. Stein's conclusions are clear: the lexicographer was by no means a neutral recorder of the vocabulary, openly speaking his mind and, in particular, bluntly expressing his criticism. The use of first and second person pronouns are, moreover, manifestations of his "quasi-oral" teaching method.

Seija Tiisala's article reflects on Jacob Serenius's Dictionarium Anglo-Svethico-Latinum (1734). Scrutiny of the paratext of this dictionary and its subsequent editions sheds light on the circles in which the clergyman-cum-politician-cum-dictionary-maker moved, and how they may have influenced his thinking. We thus see him among members of the Royal Society, Freemasons, and subscribers to his dictionary. It is primarily the social spectrum of the subscribers that attracts Tiisala's attention. Her analysis shows that Serenius mixed with merchants, industrialists (e.g. Balthasar Leyel, a director of the English East India Company), bankers, diplomats, consuls, artists, clergymen, scholars, and collectors, and he no doubt benefitted from this influential and inspiring network of contacts.

Yukka Tyrkkö's interest in medical lexicography is well known (e.g. Tyrkkö 2013). His essay under the intriguing title '"Weak Shrube or Underwood': The Unlikely Medical Glossator John Woodall and His Glossary" concerns John Woodall, a military surgeon and innovator, adventurer, and businessman. Tyrkkö concentrates on Woodall's biographical sketch before he carries out an analysis of his six surgical manuals and the glossary appended to The surgions mate (1617), in the latter case tracing the medical terms to their sources. The comparison of the paratextual features in the 1617 and the 1639 editions of the book suggests convincingly that Woodall, not a man of letters, became a medical glossator and writer by a sheer accident.

Ruxandra Visan's article "A 'Florid' Preface about 'a Language That is Very Short, Concise and Sententious'" is the last contribution in this volume. Her narrative is structured around the preface to the second edition of Nathan Bailey's Dictionarium Britannicum (1736) and its acknowledged and hitherto unacknowledged sources, including Dominique Bouhours's Les Entretiens d'Artiste et d'Eugëne (1671). By comparing the paratexts and the entries in the dictionaries under analysis, Visan illustrates how the old lexicographical material was successfully reintegrated, by decontextualisation, recontextualization, and "cultural transplantation," into new material. This is an illuminating essay indicating the anticipated, but never before so explicitly articulated (cf. Considine 2018: 508), creative uses and re-uses of linguistic and lexicographical data in eighteenth-century English dictionary-making.

To conclude, it is hoped that this collection of essays raises questions and encourages "historians of lexicography to examine the paratextual matter of dictionaries from new angles" (McConchie and Tyrkkö 2018: xi). In my opinion, this hope is well-founded. The volume is original in its methodological approach and provides a useful model against which other studies of dictionaries, techniques of dictionary compilation, and biographies of dictionary-makers and their social networks may be conducted in the future in order to investigate previously neglected areas. The content, together with the stylistic coherence and terminological consistency, for which the Editors deserve special praise, makes it a must-have for anyone interested in the complex interplay between lexicography and socio-cultural, political, and economic factors. The only matter remaining to be dealt with is that of a higher resolution which would render the images more readily readable.

Miroslawa Podhajecka

University of Opole

Poland

(mpodhajecka@uni.opole.pl)

 

References

Akasu, K. 2013. Methods in Dictionary Criticism. Jackson, H. (Ed.). 2013. The Bloomsbury Companion to Lexicography: 48-61. London: Bloomsbury.         [ Links ]

Considine, J. 2018. Review of: Shapiro, R. (Ed.). 2017. Fixing Babel: An Historical Anthology of Applied Lexicography. International Journal of Lexicography 31(4): 507-511.         [ Links ]

Dolezal, F. 1985. Forgotten but Important Lexicographers: John Wilkins and William Lloyd. A Modern Approach to Lexicography before Johnson. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.         [ Links ]

McConchie, R. 2019. Discovery in Haste. English Medical Dictionaries and Lexicographers 1547 to 1796. Berlin: De Gruyter.         [ Links ]

Ogilvie, S. 2013. Words of the World. A Global History of the Oxford English Dictionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.         [ Links ]

Podhajecka, M. 2018. History in Lexicography and Lexicography in History: A Reappraisal. Dictionaries: Journal of the Dictionary Society of North America 39(1): 131-165.         [ Links ]

Stein, G. 2014. Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer. Oxford: Oxford University Press.         [ Links ]

Swanepoel, P. 2017. Methods in Dictionary Criticism. Bielinska, M. and S.J. Schierholz (Eds.). 2017. Wörterbuchkritik. Dictionary Criticism: 81-112. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.         [ Links ]

Tyrkkö, Y. 2013. 'My Intent is Onelie to Further Those That Be Willing to Learne': The Lexicon of Mid-Sixteenth-Century Surgical Books in Context. McConchie, R.W. et al. (Eds.). 2013. Selected Proceedings of the 2012 Symposium on the New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX3): 177-188. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Proceedings Project.         [ Links ]

Van Male, T. 2004. From Incipit to Iconophor. Coleman, J. and A. McDermott (Eds.). 2004. Historical Dictionaries and Historical Dictionary Research: Papers from the International Conference on Historical Lexicography and Lexicology at the University of Leicester, 2002: 95-108. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer.         [ Links ]

 

 

1. 'Paratext' may be regarded as an umbrella term, as it refers here both to the internal history of dictionaries that focuses on the textual or visual elements in addition to the main dictionary text, and the external history that focuses on the socio-cultural background in which the dictionaries were published, marketed, and sold.
2. These include the first British edition (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859, 232 pp.), the first American edition (New York: Redfield, 1859, 218 pp.), the second British edition (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859, 218 pp.), the third British edition (London: Macmillan, 1865, 229 pp.), the fourth British edition (London/Cambridge: Macmillan, 1873, 275 pp.), the fifth British edition (London: Macmillan, 1879, 309 pp.), and a later British edition (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1906, 230 pp.). They are available from the Internet Archive at archive.org, Google Books at books.google.com, or HathiTrust at hathitrust.org.