Academy Dictionaries 1600–1800

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 All the major academy and academy-style dictionaries of the period up to 1800, published and unpublished, are discussed in a single narrative, bridging national and linguistic boundaries, to offer a history of lexicography on a European scale.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.

John Considine is Professor of English at the University of Alberta, Canada. He is author of Dictionaries in Early Modern Europe: Lexicography and the Making of Heritage (Cambridge University Press, 2008) and is co-editor, with Sylvia Brown, of The Ladies Dictionary (1694) (2010).