The book examines the work of Renaissance lexicographers such as John Palsgrave, Claudius Hollyband, Richard Huloet, and Peter Levins, with particular focus on the author at work: the struggles of these lexicographers to understand the semantic range of a word and to explain and transpose it into another language; their assessment of different linguistic and cultural expressions, and their morphological analyses; and their efforts to find ways of structuring and presenting lexical information. Gabriele Stein explores the influence of the works by Ambrogio Calepino, Robert Estienne, Hadrianus Junius, and Conrad Gesner, and the extent to which bi- and multilingual dictionaries in the 16th century are often pan-European in character; she also provides the first in-depth and richly-illustrated discussion of the use of typographical resources to present the structure of lexical information.

Gabriele Stein was Professor of English Language at the University of Heidelberg until 2006, and since then has been at University College London as a Research Associate of the English Department. She was President of the European Association for Lexicography from 1983-1986, and since 1999 has been a member of the Academia Europaea. Her publications include John Palsgrave as Renaissance Linguist (OUP 1997), Sir Thomas Elyot as Lexicographer (OUP 2014), A Usage Dictionary English-German & German-English (de Gruyter 2013), and, co-authored with Randolph Quirk, English in Use (Longman 1990)