This essay explores the role of the dictionary in religious history, specifically as a conduit of social and intellectual authority brought to bear in religious interpretation, sitting both upstream and downstream of the broader flow of history, culture, and forms of knowledge. Of particular interest is the history of three categories of reference works: the bilingual dictionary (or lexicon) focused on ancient biblical languages; the Bible dictionary, focused on biblical realia, geography, and similar topics; and the theological dictionary, focused on significant biblical ideas associated with particular words or the ancient speakers. The categories are situated historically in the development of biblical scholarship and philology in the West, from the pre-modern era through the contemporary and digital context. Two case studies demonstrate the intersection between dictionaries, biblical interpretation, and cultural ideologies: use of Bible dictionaries and lexicons in the antebellum period as a tool for attacking or defending slavery on biblical grounds in the American South; and the influence on theological dictionaries in the early twentieth century from the anti-Semitic context of Nazi Germany.

This chapter traces the complex relationship between Anne Lister and the English dictionary. Lister was an enthusiastic user of lexicons of all kinds - general, bilingual, historical and classical. By the time she turned thirty, she had compiled her own private glossary of erotic and anatomical terms as a means of making sense of her sexuality. In recent years, Lister’s life has been chronicled in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, while her diaries have been sporadically quoted in the Oxford English Dictionary. Thus far, however, Lister’s use of and by dictionaries has remained underexamined. On the one hand, though lesbian and queer scholars have provided valuable insights into Lister’s reading habits, they have not given sustained attention to her reading of dictionaries. On the other hand, dictionary scholars have until lately neglected the history of women lexicographers, while women’s writing in general has been underrepresented in the quotation banks of dictionaries from Samuel Johnson’s to the OED. This chapter begins by exploring Lister’s imaginative use of dictionaries, then surveys how her idiosyncrasies of speech and writing diverged from the linguistic and social norms endorsed by the standard lexicographers of her day.