Publisher's Synopsis
This is a companion volume to Dr Padley's monograph, Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500-1700: the Latin tradition (CUP 1976). This volume deals with the early grammar of the five main European languages - English, French, German, Italian and Spanish - and is the first to treat West European vernacular grammatical theory as a whole. Dr Padley traces the links and the tensions between this vernacular work and the underlying Latin tradition and shows the distortions to which the Latin model gave rise. He also gives the larger pedagogical and cultural context: the rise of Ramism, the shifting relationships between logic, rhetoric and grammar, the influence of seventeenth-century rationalism and empiricism through such agencies as the Royal Society, and the spread of various theories of universal grammar.
