Language, Earth and Water in Richard Verstegan's Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605) and Nederlantsche Antiquiteyten (1613)

Abstract

The name Richard Verstegan crops up every now and then in early seventeenth-century studies. The recent appearance of two articles devoted to this shadowy figure (Parry 1995; Clement 1998) could mean we are in for a ‘Verstegan revival’. One of the striking things about Verstegan is his extraordinary versatility; he not only covered a wide range of subjects, but also wrote in both English and Dutch. There have long been doubts about his identity and the authorship of some of the works ascribed to him. While recent studies concentrate on Verstegan's role in the recreation of England's Anglo-Saxon past, his very original contribution to two seemingly unrelated topics—earth history and language change—has not been fully recognised. The present paper focuses on these two areas and shows how Verstegan largely dispenses with the biblical myths of the Flood and Babel and embraces the idea of geological time and natural causes.