What does this book cover?

This book is about the history of linguistics in the West from its beginnings in the fifth century BC up until 1600. Although linguistics in many cultures outside Europe – in India, the Judeo-Arab world and China, to name only three – is at least as complex and as developed as linguistics in Europe and its American cultural offshoot, this book concentrates on Europe alone. There are now a number of good introductions to the non-European linguistic traditions by specialists, and it is misleading to treat these rich traditions as if they were merely an appendage to Europe. As for the chronological coverage, you'll find that up to the Renaissance, the intellectual history of western Europe can be discussed as a fairly coherent whole (if only because of the perspective which our distant vantage-point lends us). The Renaissance constitutes a major turning-point in western history, a turning-point marked by a new-found awareness of the outer, material, world, and consequently of external differences between nations, races, languages, customs, artefacts and so on. The markers of national differences, once perceived, contributed to the ever sharper definition of distinct national ways of experiencing the world, as much in intellectual life as in any other sphere. So from about 1600 on it becomes increasingly difficult to survey the history of linguistics in Europe as a whole; rather, you really need to focus separately on England, France, Germany, the Low Countries, Sweden, Bohemia, Italy and Spain, and their mutual interaction.