“A writing by strange markes”: The Invention of Shorthand in Early Modern England, 1588–1700

Abstract

From 1588 through the seventeenth century, approximately two hundred shorthand manuals were published in England, each purporting to contain the key to a new kind of writing said to be so fast the pen could keep pace with the tongue. Shorthand was an inventive and idiosyncratic writing system, in which words, phrases, and sometimes full sentences were expressed through an incongruous combination of characters derived from sounds and spellings, morphemes and ideographs, and a jumble of visual puns. It was a fun and fashionable way of writing, but it was also a functional script of unsurpassed security, which quickly found a place wherever writing was used. Writing masters peddled the art, and secretaries, scholars, students, clerks, and “common Meckanicks”—anyone literate with a spare shilling and enough conviction—could put it into practice, irrespective of age, sex, or status. Yet as a result of its illegibility, tied with a twentieth-century prejudice that cast shorthand as the inconsequential domain of “women’s work,” the pervasiveness of shorthand in early modern England has gone widely unrecognized in academic discourse.

This dissertation presents a thorough and multifaceted account of shorthand from its late–sixteenth-century debut to the end of the seventeenth century. At its most fundamental, this dissertation re-inserts early modern shorthand into well-documented historiographies that have hitherto disregarded it: on the intersection of orality and literacy, for example (a dichotomy that shorthand utterly subverts); on the coexistence of manuscript and print (shorthand being a manuscript technology born in the age of print); and on the seventeenth-century book trade more broadly. At its most ambitious, this dissertation advances a new approach to the history of linguistic thought, one derived not from the default study of works by the intellectual elite, but driven first and foremost by the ideas and marketable inventions of the laity. For early modern English shorthand did not merely give way to modern stenographic technologies; it propounded a different way of thinking about and representing language. It offered—indeed, it insisted upon—a new, non-Latinate mode of metalinguistic expression, and did so at the very moment in which the English vernacular was undergoing its biggest transformation on record. This was the period that ushered in the first English grammar books and dictionaries, in which people experimented with phonetic alphabets and reformed orthographies, with universal writing systems, sign languages, and philosophical characters, when vowels made their “Great Shift” and English spelling solidified into a recognizable standard. In these stories, too, shorthand is given short shrift. Yet shorthand was easily the most successful linguistic innovation of seventeenth-century England and the linchpin upon which these other language projects hung. In short, this dissertation tells the story of early shorthand, a story in which the lettered laity lay the groundwork for linguistic thinking.

In the first chapter, I introduce shorthand as a well-known phenomenon, familiar to many throughout early modern England (and registered abroad as a peculiarly English exploit). In the second, I chart the design and development of shorthand, examining both the systems themselves and the way in which they were described by their inventors as a window into non-elite linguistic thought. In the third, I examine how shorthand systems were disseminated through printed manuals, and what those books reveal about the scale and interconnected industry of shorthand. In the fourth chapter, the subject shifts from shorthand to the shorthand student, as I consider how, why, and where a person went about studying shorthand in seventeenth-century England. A five-part appendix offers a table of shorthand alphabets; a table of shorthand vowel systems; a bibliography of shorthand manuals published prior to 1700; a checklist of printed shorthand specimens; and a checklist of seventeenth-century Bibles written in shorthand.