thou art... a patch, a knaue, a naughtie one, a lyar, a ruffian, a deceauer, a wild one, a rope-cracker, a scolion, troublesome, a little foole, a wretch, wicked
Choice of insults from an early modern phrase book
As thousands of people head overseas for their holidays, many will be packing guidebooks listing the best bars, beaches and beauty spots. Far fewer will be squeezing foreign language phrase books into their bags. The British are complacent when it comes to acquiring other languages: we simply assume that most people we encounter in tourist centres will speak English. And it’s true: many of them do.
This was not the case four centuries ago when the Grand Tour was an educational rite of passage and an increasing number of entrepreneurs began to forge trade links across Europe and beyond. In the 16th and 17th century English was a minority language, a mere upstart in comparison with Latin (taught at school and considered a vital accomplishment among the elite classes) and French (the language of culture and refinement, as well as of diplomacy and commerce). A grasp of Italian too became desirable – as a language of courtly poetry and behaviour at Elizabeth’s court, a language of trade throughout the Mediterranean, and the language of opera, which seized the English fashionable imagination in the early 18th century.
A flourishing industry grew up to fill a gap in the market and in a digital Anglo-centric world these publications tell us much more about the past than simply how to buy a horse or rent a room at an inn in French. Phrase books and travel guides from the 16th and 17th centuries reveal much about the preoccupations of the time and, in the varied dialogues and phrases they offered, reflect the needs of different groups of learners, be they tourists keen to visit the art collections of Italy or the salons of Paris, merchants seeking to make deals in Dutch marketplaces, or spies intent on learning the secrets of continental powers.
John Gallagher, a PhD candidate in the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge, is fascinated by the ways in which these early phrase books are structured in terms of essential phase and vocabulary, and by the nature of the encounters they seek to make possible – from sober prayers to catalogues of raucous insult – ”I neuer thought that thou were otherwise, or an other manner of man then thou art: that is, a patch, a knaue, a naughtie one, a lyar, a ruffian, a deceauer, a wild one, a rope-cracker, a scolion, troublesome, a little foole, a wretch, wicked”. His close reading of this unique corpus of texts draws on his understanding of the social, economic and political history of the period he covers, which saw an explosion in travel and interest in the world beyond Britain.
Image: Title page of Colloquia et dictionariolum octo linguarum (Amsterdam, 1631), a pocket-sized phrasebook containing material in eight languages.
Credit: By kind permission of the Syndics of Cambridge University Library (S760.e.63.1)