The Editor Spotlight is a monthly feature which introduces readers to the forces behind our journals. Based on their own experience, editors answer questions which provide insight into their background, responsibilities, and the process of editing an academic journal.

Our Editor Spotlight for the month of March will be Ian Lancashire, editor of Lexicons of Early Modern English (LEME).

Ian Lancashire

Editor of Lexicons of Early Modern English

1. How did you get started in this field?
I prepared my first digital text of an Early Modern dictionary, John Palsgrave’s Lesclarcissement (1530), thirty years ago when I had just become Founding Director of the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), which was located at the University of Toronto Robarts Library.  Having used Palsgrave in the 1970s to annotate my Revels Plays edition of two Henrician interludes, I realized that the hundreds of extant Early Modern English printed lexicons and glossaries were a rich, largely untapped source of information on our language. My thought was to couple lexicographical and literary texts of the period in a single English Renaissance Knowledgebase. By 1996, I launched a free Web site, the Early Modern English Dictionaries Database (EMEDD), with 200,000 word-entries from a dozen texts. This led in turn to support from the Canada Foundation for Innovation and the release of Lexicons of Early Modern English in 2006 — with half a million word-entries from 150 texts, dating between 1475 and 1700 — hosted by the University of Toronto Libraries and published by UTP.

2. What are your research interests?
From 1966 to 1984,  I did research in early English drama, ultimately as bibliographer for the Records of Early English Drama series. Before founding CCH, I shifted into the digital humanities, directing the building of an interactive concordancer for the IBM PC (TACT), experimenting with computer-assisted authorship studies, and launching several large Web sites, including Representative Poetry Online (which I edited from 1994 to 2012). By 2002, my main research field became the growth of Early Modern English, but I also published with UTP in 2010 a book on an old passion, how authors make literary texts (Forgetful Muses: Reading the Author in the Text). The discovery that Alzheimer’s disease at a early stage in two of my case studies, Iris Murdoch and Agatha Christie, depleted the author’s vocabulary and increased their use of repeating phrases caught me by surprise. Now I continue research on that with scientific colleagues and am writing a book on agency in shaping Early Modern English vocabulary.

3. How would you describe the mission and objectives of Lexicons of Early Modern English?
I work to expand LEME to offer the core lexicature of the Early Modern English period, estimated at perhaps a million word-entries. These reveal what living speakers of that time — not those of us from later periods with increasingly well-informed scientific views — thought this now old, almost lost language to be.

4. What are the qualities you look for when selecting material to include in Lexicons of Early Modern English?
I begin with first editions of major lexicons, especially from the early Tudor period, in order to have a base vocabulary on which lexicographers from following decades presumably built. LEME is intended to have a generous selection of bilingual lexicons (for all major European classical and vernacular languages) and herbals, all monolingual dictionaries and glossaries, the key works in English-language etymology, and important prose discussions of the language. It is also essential to incorporate texts that serve particular subjects: chemistry, surgery, law, chemistry, business, first names and some family names, place names, forestry, heraldry, architecture, war, plants, the sea, and so on. One of my goals, just achieved, has been to include major bilingual and monolingual lexicature published during Shakespeare’s career by these eight glossographers:  Thomasius (1588), John Rider (1589), Claudius Hollyband (1593), John Florio (1598, 1611), John Minsheu (1599), Robert Cawdrey (1604), John Cowell (1607), and Randle Cotgrave (1611).

5. Who are Lexicons of Early Modern English’s key audiences and does it have a potential readership outside of academia?
LEME’s key audiences are the historians, literary critics, linguists, and readers who need a historical English dictionary that serves Early Modern English and late Middle English or that glosses major writers (e.g., Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare, John Milton, and Samuel Pepys).  Anyone exploring words and word-meaning who uses the Oxford English Dictionary will also find LEME helpful because the two overlap by under five percent, and because LEME, unlike the OED, offers explanations of meaning only by those alive in the Early Modern period. The ten bilingual Renaissance Latin dictionaries in LEME also make it convenient for the classical scholar.

Outside of academia, LEME potentially interests mavens of English vocabulary, lawyers, creative writers, theatre directors and actors of Renaissance English plays, genealogists (unlike the OED, LEME includes place names, first names, and major family names), and anyone whose avocation is a subject such as food, games, clothes, plants, hunting, sailing, and dance.

 

Lexicons of Early Modern English is a growing historical database offering scholars unprecedented access to early books and manuscripts documenting the growth and development of the English language. With more than 600,000 word-entries from 186 monolingual, bilingual, and polyglot dictionaries, glossaries, and linguistic treatises, encyclopedic and other lexical works from the beginning of printing in England to 1702, as well as tools updated annually, LEME sets the standard for modern linguistic research on the English language.