Chapter 21 - Dictionaries and Intellectual History

Summary

Intellectual history and lexicography are related to each other in multiple ways. Intellectual historians study dictionary entries as documents of the thought – for instance, the political thought – of the past. They may also attend to broader questions of dictionary structure: how did a given lexicographer think about taxonomy? Sometimes lexicographers themselves construct dictionaries as contributions to intellectual history. And the history of dictionaries is part of the history of intellectual institutions (publishing houses, universities and academies, religious bodies, and so on), which have regularly determined the scale, the metalanguage, the degree of encyclopedic content, and the relationship to canons of literature, of the lexicographical work which they sponsored. These points have very wide-ranging implications: dictionaries ultimately belong to a global intellectual history.