Early modern German is rich in words borrowed from Latin, French, and other languages. Between 1571 and 1728, these were documented in a series of more than thirty foreign-word dictionaries, of which the Teutscher Dictionarius of the schoolmaster Simon Roth was the first. It is a printed dictionary of 2,446 entries, most of them for German words that were evidently borrowed from Latin or other ancient or modern languages: a typical pair, from the midpoint of the dictionary, are invocirn (in more modern spelling, invocieren, “to invoke”) and invocation. Although the book itself is, like many early small-format dictionaries, rare, page images are, at the time of writing, easily accessible through Google Books. Scholarly discussion of the dictionary is harder to come by; it has not been studied at length since an edition of 1936, which is not in every library. So Anette Kremer’s monograph, a rapidly accomplished reworking of her Bamberg doctoral thesis, is a welcome contribution to our understanding of a milestone in the cultural history of the German language.

Because the monograph originates in a doctoral thesis, it sets out to show a wide range of relevant expertise: there are chapters contextualizing the dictionary in the history of humanism (inexpertly handled) and of sixteenth-century German lexicography, in the history of the German language, and in the life and other writings of its compiler. There is an interesting discussion of the genre of the Teutscher Dictionarius: it is not an etymological dictionary, because it seldom provides explicit etymological information; calling it a Fremdwörterbuch (foreign-word dictionary) is perhaps misleading because this word is often used of puristic dictionaries, while Roth’s work welcomes the borrowed words it records. Perhaps it could be called a hard-word dictionary like Robert Cawdrey’s English Table Alphabeticall of 1604 and its successors, but some of the words it records are very common, and are only included because Roth thought they were of foreign origin. A useful penultimate chapter explains the relationship to the Teutscher Dictionarius of the Teutsches Dictionariolum of Bernhard Heupold, which was published in editions of 1602 and 1620. This has been dismissed as a simple plagiarism of Roth’s work, from which it borrows heavily; but as Kremer shows, it reworks its original with increasing confidence as its alphabetical sequence progresses, taking over more than 90 percent of Roth’s entries in the range a to c, but fewer than 30 percent in the range p to t.

At the heart of Kremer’s work is, as her title promises, a lengthy metalexicographical analysis: an examination of the structure and contents of the dictionary as a whole, and of its individual entries. The pace at which this is undertaken is deliberate, and the interest of the findings is not always self-evident. The question of how Roth set about making his dictionary is treated rather sketchily, and this is a pity. Where did he find the words which he recorded? Many of them are by no means common. Analyzing a sample of 458 of his entries for words in alphabetical ranges documented by the ongoing Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch shows that in 173 cases, more than a third of the total, Roth’s entry is the only early source cited by the modern dictionary for a given word or sense. In 95 of those 173 cases, a form very similar to the one he gives had appeared in Jan van der Werve’s puristic Dutch dictionary Het Tresoor der Duytsscher talen in 1552. The bifurcation of Dutch and German was far from complete in 1571, a point missed by Kremer as she writes that the Teutscher Dictionarius was the first dictionary of its kind “im deutschen Sprachraum” (“in the German-speaking lands” [223]). Was the nucleus of Roth’s German dictionary a reworking of the Tresoor? This is the sort of question that is raised when dictionaries are seen historically, as texts whose authors read and responded to other texts. Kremer’s metalexicographical analysis provides useful raw material for asking interesting historical questions, but she herself does not ask as many such questions as she might have.