John Palsgrave as Renaissance Linguist

When Henry VIII charged John Palsgrave with teaching his sister French, there were no dictionaries or grammars of either French or English. In Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, a vast work of over 1,000 pages, this brilliant priest and linguist, with a dramatist's eye for contemporary life and an ear for colloquial idiom, provided the first bilingual dictionary and contrastive grammar of the two languages. Professor Stein presents a detailed study of his achievement.