Notes for a Dictionary from Seventeenth-Century Scotland

Abstract

This paper presents a transcription of a previously unknown manuscript wordlist of English terms from the vocabulary of moral philosophy, apparently compiled in Scotland in the mid-seventeenth century. It contextualizes it in the lexicographical activity of seventeenth-century Scotland; discusses its sources, prominent among which are Hobbes’s Briefe of the arte of rhetorique (1637) and John Healey’s translation of St Augustine’s De civitate Dei (1610); and comments on its relationship with other contemporary philosophical wordlists of English.