This volume examines the ways in which Renaissance lexicographers selected, described, and analysed the lexicon. It explores the extent to which bi- and multilingual word lists and dictionaries in the 16th century are often pan-European in character, and discusses the increasing use of typography to present lexical information structure.

Blanks, Space, Print, and Void in English Renaissance Literature is an inquiry into the empty spaces encountered not just on the pages of printed books in c.1500-1700, but in Renaissance culture more generally. The book argues that print culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helped to foster the modern idea of the 'gap' (where words, texts, images, and ideas are constructed as missing, lost, withheld, fragmented, or perhaps never devised in the first place). It re-imagines how early modern people reacted not just to printed books and documents of many different kinds, but also how the very idea of emptiness or absence began to be fashioned in a way which still surrounds us. Jonathan Sawday leads the reader through the entire landscape of early modern print culture, discussing topics such as: space and silence; the exploration of the vacuum; the ways in which race and racial identity in early modern England were constructed by the language and technology of print; blackness and whiteness, together with lightness, darkness, and sightlessness; cartography and emptiness; the effect of typography on reading practices; the social spaces of the page; gendered surfaces; hierarchies of information; books of memory; pages constructed as waste or vacant; the genesis of blank forms and early modern bureaucracy; the political and devotional spaces of printed books; the impact of censorship; and the problem posed by texts which lack endings or conclusions. The book itself ends by dwelling on blank or empty pages as a sign of human mortality. Sawday pays close attention to the writings of many of the familiar figures in English Renaissance literary culture - Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne, Jonson, and Milton, for example - as well as introducing readers to a host of lesser-known figures. The book also discusses the work of numerous women writers from the period, including Aphra Behn, Ann Bradstreet, Margaret Cavendish, Lady Jane Gray, Lucy Hutchinson, Æmelia Lanyer, Isabella Whitney, and Lady Mary Wroth.

The Theory of German Word Order from the Renaissance to the Present was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The uniquely systematic character of German word order and sentence structure has long been recognized as an important feature of the language and of its literary uses. This book is the first comprehensive survey of the way theorists and stylists have interpreted these features through the centuries. Aldo Scaglione contends that the story of this theoretical awareness is part of the emerging cultural and literary consciousness of the German nation, as well as a testing ground for contemporary linguistic typology. German speculation on the nature of a national language is, to Scaglione, best understood as a dialogue with the prevailing models of Latin, Italian, French, and English. His account of the debates over German word order is thus grounded in the complex historical circumstances from which they emerge: Renaissance grammarians took stock of German divergencies from the Latin cultural model, and those in the seventeenth century faced the challenges of French rationalism, nineteenth-century Romanticism and the many linguistic movements of the twentieth century have all cast new light upon the peculiarities of German sentence structure. Readers interested in historical syntax, rhetorical traditions, and the history of the German language will value both Scaglione's wide-ranging knowledge and his lively style.

As a teacher of Plato in Oxford's Literae Humaniores, Walter Pater was informed by philosophy from his earliest essays to his last book. The Platonism of Walter Pater examines Pater's deep engagement with Platonism throughout his career. It overturns his reputation as a superficial aesthete known mainly for his 'Conclusion' to The Renaissance to reposition his contribution to literature and the history of ideas. In his criticism and fiction, including his studies on myth, Pater was influenced by several of Plato's dialogues. Phaedrus, Symposium, Theaetetus, Cratylus, and The Republic informed his philosophy of beauty, history, myth, knowledge, ethics, language, and style. As a philosopher, critic, and artist, Plato embodied what it meant to be an author to Pater, who imitated his creative practice from vision to expression. For Pater Platonism was also a point of contact with his contemporaries, including Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde, offering a means to take new measure of their literary relationships. Using the interdisciplinary critical tools of Pater's own educational milieu which combined literature, philosophy, and classics, The Platonism of Walter Pater repositions the importance Pater's contribution to literature and the history of ideas.

This book foregrounds the pressures that three transformative technologies in the long sixteenth century—the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass—placed on long-held literary practices, as well as on cultural and social structures. Sheila J. Nayar disinters the clash between humanist drives and print culture; places the rise of gunpowder warfare beside the equivalent rise in chivalric romance; and illustrates fraught attempts by humanists to hold on to classicist traditions in the face of seismic changes in navigation. Lively and engaging, this study illuminates not only how literature responded to radical technological changes, but also how literature was sometimes forced, through unanticipated destabilizations, to reimagine itself. By tracing the early modern human’s inter-animation with print, powder, and compass, Nayar exposes how these technologies assisted in producing new ways of seeing, knowing, and being in the world.

The Renaissance New Testament is a monumental 18-volume work more than fifty years in the making. Randolph O. Yeager has realized here a lifelong dream, and created one of the most important biblical works of the twentieth century. It offers: The King James Version verse by verse The Yeager translation Exhaustive Greek/English concordance Lexicographical analysis Each Greek word in order of occurrence Grammatical identification The Greek text verse by verse The literal meaning A harmony of the Gospels Commentary Each volume contains approximately 600 pages, with the complete set totaling more than 10,000 pages. A true Renaissance man, Dr. Yeager holds a Ph.D. in American history, took his seminary training at Northern Baptist Theological Seminary in Chicago, and is a former university professor. He has twelve years of experience as an evangelist and has spoken at Bible conferences in forty-five states. In 1988 the Laymen's National Bible Committee honored Yeager with a Citation of Appreciation for outstanding service to the Bible cause. Publishers Weekly featured an article on Yeager and the completion of The Renaissance New Testament in its 1985 Spring Religious Books issue.

Martin Elsky here illuminates the complex interplay of linguistic theory and textual representation in English Renaissance writing. Drawing on a wide range of materials, both literary and nonliterary, Elsky focuses on the impact of speech-oriented and writing-dominated theories of language on textual practice. Among the texts Elsky discusses are Herbert's The Temple, Bacon's Magna Instauratio, Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, Jonson 's lyrics, and works by Lily, Colet, Ascham, and Elyot. In showing how speech, writing, and print suggest contrasting foundations for the authority of language, Elsky considers such topics as the competing concepts of textuality in humanist literature and in hieroglyphic poetry; the authenticity of writing and the distortions of speech in scientific prose works; the social context of printing scientific prose; and the use of print to create the infinitely expandable text of philosophical skepticism. A provocative application of contemporary literary theory to the historical analysis of texts, Authorizing Words will interest readers in such disciplines as Renaissance studies, theory of language, historical linguistics, history of science, and the history of communication.

Some of today's foremost Renaissance scholars look afresh at the remarkable products of the first age of print and explore how these anticipated many of the conditions of the present digital age.

Essays - collected in honour of Margaret Bent - examining how medieval and Renaissance composers responded to the tradition in which they worked through a process of citation of and commentary on earlier authors.