A Concordance to the Complete Poems of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)

This concordance is a new and major contribution to rediscovering the corpus of work and achievements from the sixteenth-century poet Henry Howard. It is an integrated and intellectually accessible resource with significant innovations in literary concordances, archaic words, modern words with obsolete meanings, and words with multiple means.

---

The Concordance is entirely new. Based upon the finalized, edited texts of Surrey's poems as published in A Critical Edition of the Complete Poems of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey, (Edwin Mellen Press) it is, on the one hand, traditional in its format providing an alphabetical index of all words of lexical meaning, together with the lines in which they are used, on the other hand, it is ground-breaking. As a significant innovation in literary concordances, archaic words, modern words with obsolete meanings, and words with multiple meaning have been glossed, as have all proper names other than those that need no explanation. This has been possible because, uniquely, the editor of the Critical Edition is also the concordancer. The purpose of this Concordance in conjunction with the Critical Edition, is to bring to life comprehensively the verse, language and significance of a poet whose influence continues to be felt in the major English-literary forms he invented and in the metrical regularity and fluency he attained. Composing poetry at the very beginning of the English Renaissance, Surrey was able to exploit an especially rich linguistic environment.
Through this Concordance, the range of Surry's vocabulary and expression archaic, obsolete, idiomatic, dialectal, foreign, contemporary, invented and the degree to which he repeated and also varied words and phrases, can readily be approached and mapped. In addition, the Concordance creates a platform for scholarly exploration of the diction of Surrey's medieval predecessors, Henrician contemporaries and Elizabethan and Jocobean successors.