The fundamental study on Minsheu's lexicographical work is in Roger J.Steiner's Two Centuries of Spanish and English Bilingual Lexicography (1590 - 1800), Mouton, The Hague-Paris, 1970. Steiner analyses the relationship between Minsheu's dictionary and its immediate bilingual predecessor (the Richard Percyvall/ Dr D'Oylie Bibliotheca Hispanica, 1591), the influence of other lexicons (Nebrija's Lexicon and Dictionum hispanarum, Las Casas' Vocabulario de las dos lenguas toscana y castellana, John Rider's English-Latin dictionary, John Florio's A Worlde of Wordes, other polyglot vocabularies) and estimates the extent to which Minsheu used informants and his own experience of Spanish. The Dictionary first appeared in 1599, printed by Edmund Bollifant, and again in 1623, printed by John Haviland for William Aspley, Edward Blount and Matthey Lownes. Between these two publications, Minsheu completed his extraordinary lexical masterpiece, Ductor in linguas, The Guide into Tongues (1617), an eleven-language polyglot composed according to Minsheu's concept of "a harmony of tongues", his notion of how languages interrelate. Bound in with the Ductor in linguas there is a Vocabularium Hispanicolatinum et Anglicum copiossissimum/A Most Copious Spanish Dictionarie with Latine and English (and sometimes other languages). He raised money for the expenses and publication costs of this audacious work by public subscription. The list of subscribers gives an instructive picture of contemporaries who were interested in foreign-languages, among them notably John Donne. Minsheu is said to have been the first in the history of printed books in Britain to raise the publication costs by subscription.

The Guide into Tongues and This Most Copious Spanish Dictionary (which Minsheu claimed took up "the greater part of this twenty yeeres") do not seem to have influenced the 1623 Dictionary. Why did Minsheu not take the opportunity on the republication of his Dictionary to incorporate material from his great work of 1617? The question remains unanwered. But there is a bibliographical oddity about this publication. Steiner argues that Minsheu's 1623 dictionary was a 'completely reset job' but the claim is not corroborated by two copies of the Dictionary which I have examined side by side. The copies of 1599 and 1623 in the British Library (434.c.15 [lacking the English-Spanish section] and 627. l.16 respectively) allow a direct comparison to be made, and while the titlepage and preliminaries of 1623 (627. l.16) are different from those of 1599, I conclude that the body of text in the Spanish-English section, Grammar and Dialogues is identical to 1599. The collations of the British Library 1599 and the 1623 (627.i.16) coincide, excepting the preliminaries. A pencilled note in 627.i.16, A2 recto, corroborates this view: 'This leaf and the rest of the text is of the 1599 edition'. One explanation is that 627.i.16 is a unique copy of 1599 to which 1623 preliminaries were later attached -- in effect a 'one-off'. But another conclusion to draw - and one that the investigation of further copies may corroborate - is that sheets of 1599 were reissued in 1623 with a new titlepage and preliminaries. The period of time for which sheets were preserved is long, but not unrealistically so, especially since by his own admission Minsheu was fully occupied with The Guide into Tongues in the period between the first and second publication. It may be ungenerous but pertinent to recall that John Minsheu had a reputation as a "rogue" (the source is Ben Jonson in a letter to Drummond of Hawthornden), and hence attribute the carefull conservation of unsold sheets to a canny disposition, in keeping with Minsheu's frequent protestations of the financial hardship faced by the linguist. Nevertheless, Steiner is also right. If we compare 1599 with the Huntingdon copy of 1623 (examined from the Ann Arbor StC microfilm collection), the differences soon become evident; these typographical and textual differences, such as noted by Steiner from a copy he does not identify, argue conclusively for 1623 being a quite separate edition of the work. The preliminaries are the same as those in the British Library 1623 (627.i.16), but the body of text, while being a page-by-page reprint of 1599 down to almost the last detail, is a complete reset and follows a different collation. Indeed, other copies available in the Ann Arbor collection also confirm Steiner's analysis. A careful scrutiny of all surviving copies will, I am sure, bear out my conclusion that in 1623 Haviland did two things: he used up sheets left over from 1599 and he also reset the entire work. Of further bibliographical interest are the variant titlepages of 1623, which between them name three different publishers/booksellers, alterations which were carried out when the titlepage was in press.

For the purposes of the electronic Minsheu, the choice of the 1599 copy at St Andrews University Library is appropriate. It represents the princeps. Furthermore, on the basis of copies of 1623 which have been consulted, there are no substantive differences in the body of text between the princeps and either the reissue or the edition of 1623.