Logodaedalus: Word Histories of Ingenuity in Early Modern Europe - Hardcover

"This book is a model of what scholarship can achieve when it investigates the histories of words for what they reveal of the cultural processes of making and meaning that shaped them and were shaped by them. The authors of Logodaedalus--cunning wordsmiths in their own right--have produced a mind-sharpening exercise in comparative historical lexicography that brilliantly exceeds the sum of its parts." --Richard Scholar, author of The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe "The scope and detail of this fascinating book mean that anyone who reads it will have much to learn. Its polyglot and lexicographical approach releases the study of early modern ingenuity from the corrals of individual national languages, and suggests both new ways of understanding the prehistory of 'genius' and of writing cultural history through scrupulous attention to the histories of words." --Kathryn Murphy, Oriel College, University of Oxford

Longdaedalus, a prehistory of the idea of genius, explores the various ways this language of ingenuity was defined, used, and manipulated between 1470 and 1750. By analyzing printed dictionaries and other lexical works across a range of languages-Latin, Italian, Spanish, French, English, German and Dutch-the authors reveal ways in which significant words produced meaning in history and found expression in natural philosophy, medicine, natural history, mathematics, mechanics, poetics and artistic theory.