Abstract
Historians of lexicography in the English-speaking world have implied that Robert Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall (1604) is the first English dictionary. Landau (1984, 2001) makes this claim, adding that it is “the least inspiring of all seminal works”.
In this paper, I agree that the Table Alphabeticall is uninspiring, but I deny that it is a seminal work. Landau overlooks the rich 16th-century tradition of Renaissance and Humanist lexicography in Europe, in particular the Dictionarum, seu Thesaurus Linguae Latinae of Robert Estienne (1531) and the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae of his son Henri Estienne (1572).
These seminal works are astonishing achievements— breathtaking innovations—in terms of both scholarship and technology. They set standards for subsequent European lexicography.
Two technological innovations made these great dictionaries possible: the invention of printing by Gutenberg in Strasbourg in about 1440 and the typography of Nicolas Jenson in Venice in 1462. These technological developments