Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’: Defining Early Modern Girlhood
- 2 Roaring Girls and Unruly Women: Producing Femininities
- 3 Female Infants and the Engendering of Humanity
- 4 Where Are the Girls in English Renaissance Drama?
- 5 Voicing Girlhood: Women's Life Writing and Narratives of Childhood
- Epilogue: Mass-Produced Languages and the End of Touristic Choices
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - ‘A wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’: Defining Early Modern Girlhood
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Series Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 ‘A wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’: Defining Early Modern Girlhood
- 2 Roaring Girls and Unruly Women: Producing Femininities
- 3 Female Infants and the Engendering of Humanity
- 4 Where Are the Girls in English Renaissance Drama?
- 5 Voicing Girlhood: Women's Life Writing and Narratives of Childhood
- Epilogue: Mass-Produced Languages and the End of Touristic Choices
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Puella, a wenche.
Puellaris, re, chyldishe.
Puellascere, to wax yong again, to be maidenly.
Thomas Elyot, 1542Puella, ae, foemini, gene. A wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell.
Puellaris, re, chyldyshe, of gyrles, propre to girles and wentches.
Puellariter, lyke a wentche or gyrle, childyshely.
Puellasco, scere, to waxe yonge againe, to bee maidenly, to waxe gyrlyshe.
Puellula, ae, f.g.a. littell gyrle, a wentche.
Thomas Cooper, 1548When Thomas Cooper set about revising Thomas Elyot's Latin-English dictionary Bibliotheca Eliotae, his aim was to ‘castigate’ and ‘augment’ the original to give ‘the true significacions of wordes’. Among the words that Cooper castigated and augmented was the Latin noun puella, whose entry Cooper expanded to provide a fuller, if not a truer, set of English equivalents. Where Elyot had given the English translation for puella simply as ‘a wench’ in 1542, Cooper gave the entry six years later as ‘a wentche, a gyrle, a Damsell’. This extension was part of Cooper's overall attempt to give expanded translations for a number of Latin words, and the addition of ‘girl’ to entries related to puella was a consistent feature of Cooper's revisionary activity. To Elyot's entry for the Latin verb puellascere, ‘to wax yong again, to be maidenly’, Cooper added ‘to waxe gyrlyshe’, once again giving the word ‘girl’ as an alternative for puella. In addition to inserting ‘girl’ into Elyot's existing entries, Cooper supplemented the section of words related to puella with entries for puellariter, ‘lyke a wentche or gyrle’, and puellula, ‘a littell gyrle, a wentche’.
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- Information
- The Girlhood of Shakespeare's SistersGender, Transgression, Adolescence, pp. 20 - 61Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2013