Praise the Lord all ye nations: Polyglot dictionaries

The dictionaries discussed in chapters 4, 5 and 6 dealt with languages that could be identified as part of the national heritage of one of the emerging nation-states of late medieval and early modern Europe. These, I have suggested, belong to a period when local heritages came to be invested with greater imaginative power than the shared heritage of classical antiquity. However, the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries also saw three kinds of lexicographical work that engaged with multiple or universal heritages. These were the making of polyglot dictionaries; the making of dictionaries of artificial universal languages; and the use of dictionaries to illuminate the origins of all languages.

There were several major traditions of polyglot dictionaries in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. One has been touched on above: that of dictionaries whose primary aim was to give an account of a single language but which were enriched with cognate forms from other languages. Such a dictionary would usually, as in the cases of Kiel’s Etymologicum teutonicae linguae and Franciscus Junius’ Etymologicum anglicanum, be offered explicitly as an etymologicon of the target language; the dictionary materials preserved in MSS Junius 2 and 3 are halfway between being a single-language etymologicon with generously provided cognates and being a union dictionary of multiple languages. Two other traditions, which account between them for about three hundred published dictionaries, are too important not to consider here, although they can only be treated cursorily.