Anglo Norman Dictionary (Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association) [Paperback]

The Anglo-Norman Dictionary in its first edition (AND1, 1977-1992) was the only dictionary which attempted to provide coverage of medieval French as used in Britain. Perhaps inevitably, during the course of publication the Dictionary changed, but in the case of AND1 the modification towards the middle of the alphabet was radical, with the inclusion of material drawn from Elsie Shanks's very substantial Dictionary of Law French, and the fichier assembled by J. P. Collas. Taken together, these two sources, which extensively explored the non-literary register of administrative and legal Anglo-Norman, dramatically changed the range and scale of AND1, so that the second half of the first edition is strikingly different from the first. In the late 1980s, the decision was taken to revise the entire dictionary for what, in the event, is proving to be a massively altered second edition. Not only is the Shanks and Collas material now being incorporated into earlier letters; the new dictionary (AND2) also draws on substantial quantities of hitherto unpublished documents which have appeared since the early 1970s. Lexical coverage has been enormously expanded in the fields of administration, law, science, botany, and medicine. The revised edition draws extensively on concordanced and digitized texts, and it offers a well-developed coverage of locutions. It features, too, a substantially revised layout. The articles are broken down and made much more usable by including a summary of the main senses at the head of each article, numbered in a way that takes a reader directly to the relevant portion of the entry body. As well as speeding up the location of a particular sense, this layout offers a clear overview of the principal semantic pattern of a particular word.