This study by Starnes and Noyes was immediately recognized as a unique and pioneering work of scholarship and has long been the standard work on the emergence and early flowering of English lexicography. Within the last 20 years we have been witnessing a remarkable scholarly interest in the study of dictionary-making and the role played by dictionaries in the transmission and preservation of knowledge and learning. It is therefore essential to have this classic work available again to all students of linguistic history. In its new edition the book has been vastly enhanced by a lengthy and invaluable introduction by Gabriele Stein, Professor of English Linguistics in Heidelberg and author of The English Dictionary before Cawdrey (1985). In her introduction to the present volume she sets out in scholarly detail the work that has emerged since 1946, which makes this study of the English dictionary from Cawdrey to Johnson as complete as the original authors themselves would have wished.
Late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England - the period between the Restoration and the South Sea Bubble - was dramatically transformed by the massive cost of fighting wars, and, significantly, a huge increase in the re-export trade. This book seeks to ask how commerce was legitimated, promoted, fashioned, defined and understood in this period of spectacular commercial and financial 'revolution'. It examines the packaging and portrayal of commerce, and of commercial knowledge, positioning itself between studies of merchant culture on the one hand and of the commercialisation of society on the other. It focuses on four main areas: the Royal Exchange where the London trading community gathered; sermons preached before mercantile audiences; periodicals and newspapers concerned with trade; and commercial didactic literature. Dr NATASHA GLAISYER teaches in the Department of History at the University of York.