Table of Contents

1: Introduction
Part I: Curiosity
2: Western lexicographers in the lands of the Mongols
3: Curiosity and lexicography from Petrarch to Leibniz
4: The history of lexicography and the history of curiosity
Part II: The long sixteenth century
5: The first curiosity-driven wordlists: Rotwelsch
6: The broadening tradition: wordlists of other cryptolects
7: The curiosity-driven lexicography of a whole language: Romani
8: Weakly codified languages and lexicography in the sixteenth century
9: Curiosity-driven lexicography in the sixteenth century
Part III: The long seventeenth century
10: Languages and regional varieties
11: Natural history and lexicography: John Ray and his friends
12: Ray's Collection of English words
13: Ray's German contemporaries and successors
14: Edward Lhuyd: The making of a lexicographer
15: Edward Lhuyd, travelling lexicographer
16: Edward Lhuyd's Glossography
Part IV: The long eighteenth century
17: Polyglot collections from Gessner to Leibniz
18: Witsen, Leibniz, and the turn to Inner Eurasia
19: Strahlenberg and the lexicography of Inner Eurasia
20: Early wordlists of Scandinavian regionalisms
21: Early wordlists of Finnish and Sámi
22: Johan Ihre and Swedish lexicography
23: Dying languages
24: Old Prussian and Polabian
25: Cornish and Manx
Part V: Into the nineteenth century
26: Dictionaries of Scottish Gaelic in the century of Ossian
27: Bardic dictionaries: Faroese, Serbian, and Breton
28: Lexicography and national epic in Finland
Conclusion: Writing the history of lexicography

About the Author

John Considine teaches English at the University of Alberta, and contributes as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, of which he was formerly an assistant editor. His books include Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe (2008), Academy Dictionaries 1600-1800 (2014), and the edited volume Ashgate Critical Essays on Early English Lexicographers: The Seventeenth Century (2012). He has also written on etymology, book history,
and early modern literature. He is at present writing a new history of dictionaries in the British Isles from 1500 to 1800, and editing the Cambridge World History of Lexicography. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

Reviews

Offers a panoramic survery of a little-known chapter in the overlapping histories of linguistics ... Considine's work resurrects these almost forgotten practices and their fascinating results, and might even point the way towards a new oral history of early modern Europe.
*John Gallagher, Times Literary Supplement*

This excellent Book follows on from and complements John Considines two earlier books on European dictionaries This third volume meets the high standards set by its predecessors ... The obscurity of some of the languages discussed under lines the breadth of Considines treatment: they include Arin, Chuvash, Crimean Gothic, Dragwa, Lak, and Mordvin ... Considine is well versed in the national, political, social, and religious contexts of the books he discusses, and uses his knowledge both to place specific dictionaries and to make interesting comparisons between them. One can almost imagine a history of Europe in the period written through the history of the dictionaries.
*Christopher Stray, The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society*