The Bishop's Grammar
Robert Lowth and the Rise of Prescriptivism
Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade
Reviews and Awards
"This is a key book for any scholar working on grammatical norms of the English language, and/or the codification and standarisation of English."--Linguist List
"Tieken's great virtue is paying attention to what Lowth actually wrote, both for publication and for private circulation. rather than depending on the caricatures. She has discovered a writer on language who was uncommonly sensitive to different degrees of formality ... The Bishop's Grammar is not the last word on Lowth but, if we're lucky, it will reduce the amount of foolishness attributed to 'the eighteenth-century grammarians' by those who haven't bothered to read them. "--Jack Lynch, Times Literary Supplement
"Tieken-Boon van Ostade has presented a book which is remarkable in many ways." --Language and History