Abstract for the How to Do Things with Early Modern Words conference, 23–25 April, Loughborough, UK.
Samuli Kaislaniemi
University of Eastern Finland
One challenge in editing early modern English texts is lexis. The first place to look for the meanings of unfamiliar words is of course the OED, but even that dictionary has its limitations. First, the OED does not contain every word ever found in English. It can explain who are meant by hes and hoos, but not how much is a conk of corn. And second, the definitions and usage information found in the OED are not always correct. It does accurately explain what a cony-catching person is like, but is quite wrong about what it means to be described as lapidable.
It is therefore necessary to find other sources for definitions of words, or better definitions, as well as for examples of usage. In the past, these sources included books such as dialect dictionaries and the glossaries of previously published editions. Today, we turn to the World Wide Web for thousands of digitised books, including older dictionaries and editions, but also resources like LEME and EEBO, historical and modern maps, as well as scholarly publications.
Although digital resources have vastly extended the reach of historical research, their apparent comprehensiveness is an illusion. In all the billions of words of digitised Early and Late Modern English texts, there are only seven known instances of lapidable, and no other known instances of conk. In other words, sometimes there is still simply not enough material available in digital form, and sometimes the massive digital resources bring little added value to the deciphering of words.
In this paper, I use these and other words to explore how the use of printed editions, digital resources, and archival sources affect and shape scholarly practices. While source criticism is a fundamental step in research, the formats of primary sources come with restrictions and biases which may not be immediately clear.
References
EEBO = Early English Books Online. University of Michigan, Oxford University and ProQuest Information & Learning. Available to subscribers at search.proquest.com/eebo.
LEME = Lexicons of Early Modern English. 2019. 2nd ed. Ed. by Ian Lancashire. Toronto: University of Toronto Library & University of Toronto Press. leme.library.utoronto.ca.
OED = Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford University Press. Available to subscribers at www.oed.com.