Academy Dictionaries 1600-1800

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).

• 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.

'Considine achieves a good balance of primary and secondary sources, surveying the existing scholarship and advancing it with new research, and he writes with admirable clarity. … Essential.' J. T. Lynch, Choice