Words that matter : linguistic perception in Renaissance English
The grammar and rhetoric of Tudor and Stuart England prioritized words and word-like figures rather than sentences, a prioritizing that had significant consequences for linguistic representation. Examining a wide range of historical sources - treatises, grammars, poems, plays, rhetorics, logics, dictionaries, and sermons - the author investigates how words matter as currency or memento, graphic symbol or template, icon or topos. She explores how words are the matter of fiction, of justice, of salvation, and of permanence: matters of life and death. She also shows the historical and theoretical relevance to linguistic perception of distinctively creative writing, giving sustained attention to texts of Jonson, Andrewes, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne. These writers share a single linguistic universe, shaped only in part, but in significant part, by print and lexicography
Print Book, English, ©1996
Stanford University Press, Stanford, Calif., ©1996
Criticism, interpretation, etc
xi, 338 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm
9780804726313, 0804726310
34113274
Prologue
1. Frozen words
2. Latin and lexicons
3. The definitive word
4. Stones well squared
5.Magic and metaphor
6. Weighing words