Susanne Schulz-Falster Catalogue Fifteen

Rare early edition of the First English–Latin Dictionary, the Promptuarium
Parvulorum, in effect the beginning of English lexicography, and the first
Latin-English Dictionary bound together. The Promptuarium Parvulorum,
or The Children’s Storeroom or Repository was composed by Galfridus, or
Geoffrey the Grammarian, an East Anglian monk, around 1440 and first
printed by Richard Pynson in 1499. It is of the greatest importance. Here
for the first time the primary object was the elucidation of English not of
Latin, and thus this can be seen as the beginning of English lexicography.
Some 12,000 words are listed, in alphabetical order, with nouns and other
parts of speech listed first, followed by verbs. Each ‘English’ word is ‘translated’
by one or more Latin words. As is obvious from the list of sources
cited, the work is based on extensive research.
The Promptuarium is bound here together with the Ortus Vocabulorum,
also printed by Wynkyn de Worde, for convenience of use. Even though the
two works are sometimes found bound together they were issued separately.
The Ortus Vocabulorum, the ‘Garden of Words’, a Latin-English dictionary,
claims in its title to offer its readers ‘almost all the things that are in the
Catholicon, the Breviloquis, the Cornucopia, the Gemma Vocabulorum
and the Medulla grammatice, together with an exposition in the vernacular
English’. The Ortus Vocabulorum was first printed by Wynkyn de Worde in
1500, and no earlier manuscript is known.
‘Several editions of the Promptorium issued from the press of Wynkyn de
Worde, in small quarto form; copies in fine condition are scarcely less rare
than that printed by Pynson... Occasionally the Latin-English dictionary,
Ortus Vocabulorum, printed by the same printer and the like form, is found
bound up with the Promptorium for the convenience of students’. (Way III
xliv–xlv).
catalogue fifteen