The Beginnings of English Paracelsian Lexicography: Two Collections of Words from Elizabethan Cambridge

Abstract

This article identifies the first two collections of Paracelsian words to have been printed in England: a body of 153 new and rare words, or new senses of existing words, dispersed in the third edition of Thomas Thomas’s Latin–English Dictionarium of 1592, and a list of forty-three words forming part of Joseph Hall’s Latin prose satire Mundus alter et idem, published in 1605. The Paracelsian material in the Dictionarium has been practically unknown until now, and the Paracelsian material in Mundus alter et idem has been insufficiently studied. Both collections of words are edited here, with discussion of their sources and the principles on which they were selected, and with discussion of their influence for the period of more than half a century when they were the only collections of Paracelsian words printed in England.