This book serves as a welcome addition to the better known "English Dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson, 1604-1755," by Starnes & Noyes (new edition published by Benjamins 1991). Whereas Starnes & Noyes describe the history of English lexicography as an evolutionary progress-by-accumulation process, Professor Hayashi focuses on issues of method and theory, starting with John Palsgrave's "Lesclarissement de la langue francoyse" (1530), to John Walker's "A Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language" (1791). This book also includes a detailed discussion of Dr. Johnson's influential "Dictionary of the English Language" (1755).
In this book the author explores the various meanings assigned to goods sold retail from 1550 to 1820 and how their labels were understood. The first half of the book focuses on these labels and on mercantile language more broadly; how it was used in trade and how lexicographers and others approached what, for them, were new vocabularies. In the second half, the author turns to the goods themselves, and their relationships with terms such as ’luxury’, ’choice’ and ’love’; terms that were used as descriptors in marketing goods. The language of objects is a subject of ongoing interest and the study of consumables opens up new ways of looking at the everyday language of the early modern period as well as the experiences of trade and consumption for both merchant and consumer.
Sarah Fyge Egerton (1668-1723) is an intriguing poet who wrote a great deal of poetry during a period when women poets were relatively rare. Her career also began at an astonishingly early age: she was barely fourteen years old when one of her poems was first printed in London. Throughout much of her life Egerton used poetry to share her thoughts, vent her feelings, and participate, to a highly unusual degree, in the public discourse of her times. The Female Advocate is perhaps her most famous single work. It was her very first publication and was printed three times in her own lifetime”in 1686, in a revised edition in 1687 and once more in 1707. The original 1686 edition is included in this volume along with the third edition of 1707, which is very rare. Alongside The Female Advocate in this volume is Egerton's Poems on Several Occasions, Together with a Pastoral. This is a diverse volume with no obvious pattern or design but which includes many poems which display real talent and can express surprisingly assertive or unexpected views, suggesting the volume deserves far more analytical attention than it has yet received.