John Palsgrave as Renaissance Linguist

The year 1530 saw the publication in London of one of the most remarkable books of the Renaissance: Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse. The author of this vast work of over 1,000 pages was John Palsgrave, graduate of Cambridge, Paris, and Oxford, priest and chaplain to Henry VIII, and tutor to the King's sister. His book is the first dictionary of two neighbouring vernaculars, English and French, and simultaneously the first contrastive grammar of thetwo languages. It reveals him as a pioneering and exceptional linguist with a sharply observant and analytical mind, who goes far beyond the traditional application of Latin grammar-writing to two living languages. The book is also remarkable for the liveliness with which Palsgrave discusses and illustratesthe social aspects of language use, dialectal variation, and the vigour of colloquial idiom. In this uniquely detailed study Stein sets the author and his book in their wider sociohistorical context and discusses Palsgrave's syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analyses, some of which anticipate the findings of modern linguistics by over 400 years.

I expected this book to be informative; it was also intriguing and wonderfully written./ Though much of the book, as readers should expect, is logically a detailed discussion of a specialized topic, Stein goes far beyond that. Her accomplishment is to show how ILesclarcissementI alone can be used as an historical witness to the age, taking Palsgrave's grammatical and lexicographical samples to illustrate contemporary society./ She has set a remarkable standard./ Alan Cottrell, Cottey College, Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol 30, no 1, 1999., Gabriele Stein has carried on the banner and crowned her dedicated research with a remarkable book., Immensely rich book ... it cannot be ignored by anyone concerned with the development of French and English in the medieval period ... well researched and perceptive, so that her readers can appreciate fully the remarkable degree of innovation that Palsgrave brought to all aspects of his task., ...the most comprehensive work yet published ... While focused primarily on one linguist, Stein's study treats topics which are applicable to other eras in the history of lexicography, and scholars from other disciplines of linguistics will gain much from it as well ... Stein provides an extensive bibliography which will facilitate the consultation of the literature on Lesclarissement and related topics. It is with her study that the prospective Palsgrave scholar should begin., Stein, one of the few scholars competent to undertake the project ... has now certainly written the definitive book on the topic ... Stein has of course done much more than exploring just this one aspect: she has brought out Palsgrave's exceptional achievement and pointed to the rich sources available in his compilation for historical linguistics of several disciplines ... Gabriele Stein has carried on the banner and crowned her dedicated research with a remarkable book.