The history, and parameters, of specialized dictionaries are of necessity somewhat vague, as they invite examination of the role and content of a dictionary. This chapter looks at works ranging from hard word dictionaries to treatises on communicating via naval flags and telegraphic code books, all of which might be categorized as specialized dictionaries.

This concluding chapter showcases the ways that rivers and their stories bound stories and places across the ages, despite very tangible changes to the environmental and urban contexts of Europe post 1000. These stories helped people on the other end of the year 1000 shift to negotiate, as had Ausonius and Fortunatus, between change and continuity, past and present. It starts with a discussion of a thirteenth century artwork, the Metz ceiling, connecting it to Late Antique and early medieval ideas of hybrid animals, hybrid identities, and other kinds of barrier crossing in and around water. It concludes with an exploration of the encyclopedic Liber Floridus (c. 1100) as hybrid/composite text. How did its author use the stories of the past? How did artists and authors in the Central Middle Ages assess and assemble the inherited ideas about rivers and their relation to human identity? Just as rivers are continually reshaped yet (mostly) endure, their stories and uses shift over time, yet persist. There is always a riverscape that is shaping contemporary cultures that are also looking back to the past to find meaning in nature.

The Introduction offers a contextual framework for exploring aspects of eighteenth-century thought. In the first section, ‘Ideas and their history’, the question of how to approach the ways of thinking that animated English-speaking peoples some three centuries ago is briefly considered. This is followed by an outline of how knowledge was structured in the eighteenth century, particularly as this is reflected in the pioneering encyclopedias of the period, such as Ephraim Chambers’s Cyclopédia and the French Encyclopédie. The limitations of attempts to label the prevailing intellectual ethos of the period (Age of Reason, of Revolutions, of Enlightenment, of secularization, of progress) or to define its temporal limits (the ‘long’ eighteenth century) are next considered. The introduction concludes with a discussion of the institutional framework and social habits—elements of the sociology of knowledge—that structured intellectual inquiry in the eighteenth century. A short appendix of terms highlights differences between the meanings of key words in the eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries: how they were understood and used then, in contrast with their meaning for us now.

Chaucer’s literary imagination is fuelled by a highly mediated and contextualised access to his classical sources, almost always supported by, filtered through, or read against the vernacular works of European contemporaries. He is a cultural synapse between Latin literature and the vernaculars of medieval Europe. Chaucer’s classical knowledge was a bricolage made up of direct knowledge of some Latin works (especially those of Ovid and Virgil); some knowledge of Latin works supported by translations or commentaries in the European vernaculars in which he was comfortable, especially French and Italian; and some knowledge of vernacular reworkings of earlier Latin materials which he was able to finesse and nuance by referring back to the Latin originals. Throughout the House of Fame, a key text for his literary self-awareness, Chaucer imaginatively explores his own understanding of, and relationship to, antecedent literature, and particularly to the literature of Latin antiquity as it had survived into his lifetime.

Thomas Hoccleve referred to Chaucer as the ‘firste fyndere of our faire langage’. The word fyndere is carefully chosen, as a modified translation of the first ‘canon’ of classical and medieval rhetoric, the ancestor of present-day English invention. Any assessment of Chaucer’s ‘poetic art’ requires us not just to identify the linguistic choices available to him, it also requires us to ask how those choices relate to his broader poetics. Chaucer’s use of ‘pronouns of power’, for example, do not only characterise particular choices from the linguistic resources of London Middle English, they are also a matter of style, a notion for which classical and medieval literary theoreticians had their own terminology, distinguishing high, middle and low styles, widely recognised as having distinct functions relating to social status and roles. It is conceivably as a metrist, however, that Chaucer’s skill as a ‘finder’ is perhaps most subtly demonstrated, as examples from his works show.