Description: Religious texts played a central role in the historical development of English. Harnessing corpus linguistic techniques, historical pragmatics, and the history of the English church, this book interrogates the keywords that have dominated English religious expression from the end of the medieval period to the eve of the Darwinian age. Exploring a number of historical religious works from the late medieval period to the nineteenth century, it shows how changes in the deployment of key words reflected their evolving socio-cultural functions, and how their usage subsequently moved beyond religious texts to shape contemporary literary and political works. It includes numerous case-studies involving prophetic women, pamphleteers, preachers and philosophers, alongside prominent theologians, literary authors and other well-known figures. Offering new insights into the growing cross-disciplinary enterprise of theolinguistics in an engaging and accessible way, this study is essential reading for both English historical linguists and historians of English Christianity.
Brief description: Jeremy J. Smith is Senior Research Fellow and Professor Emeritus, University of Glasgow, and Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews. Recent publications include Transforming Early English (Cambridge, 2020) and The Victorian Reinvention of Medieval Liturgy (with David Jasper, Boydell and Brewer, 2023). Lexicons of English Religion 1380-1850 received funding from the Leverhulme Trust.
Review Quotes: 'Combining fascinating analyses of the words used by this person, in this place, at this time with the latest methods in corpus linguistics, this book is for everyone who cares about how we study the English of the past.' Wendy Scase, Emeritus Professor of Medieval English Literature, University of Birmingham