Words that matter
Subtitle: linguistic perception in Renaissance English
By: Judith H. Anderson.
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Stanford, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 338
Subjects: English literature -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- History and criticism; English language -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Lexicology; English language -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Semantics; Language and culture -- England -- History -- 16th century; Language and culture -- England -- History -- 17th century; English language -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Style; Rhetoric, Renaissance; Renaissance -- England
Description: 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.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 301-329) and index.