Stu Clayton pointed me to the DNB entry on Mark Ridley, who led an interesting life:
Ridley, Mark (b. 1560, d. in or before 1624), physician and writer on magnetism, was born on 2 August 1560, and baptized on 18 August, at Stretham, Cambridgeshire, the second son of the six children of Lancelot Ridley (d. 1576), rector of Stretham, and his wife, Mary. Having matriculated as a pensioner from Clare College, Cambridge, at Easter 1577, he graduated BA in 1581 and MA in 1584. On 25 September 1590 he was licensed by the College of Physicians to practise medicine, and from 26 June 1592 he is shown in the annals of the college as MD. On 28 May 1594 he was admitted as a fellow of the college, having been appointed the day before by Queen Elizabeth to serve the tsar of Russia, Feodor Ivanovich, who had written to the queen requesting the services of an English physician. William Cecil, Lord Burghley, was instrumental in the appointment.
Ridley remained in Moscow for five years. Another of the tsar’s physicians in 1594–7, simultaneously with him, was Baldwin Hamey the elder. Following the death of Tsar Feodor on 7 January 1598 Ridley was appointed to the service of his successor, Boris Godunov. At the request of Queen Elizabeth, however, he was given leave to return to England in 1599 and was present in London at a meeting of the College of Physicians held on 1 October that year. […] Ridley’s scientific interests extended beyond medical matters into magnetism, a subject on which he published two books: A Short Treatise of Magneticall Bodies and Motions (1613) and Magneticall Animadversions: made by Marke Ridley, doctor in physicke, upon certaine magneticall advertisements, lately published, from Maister William Barlow (1617). […]
I’ll pass over the accusation of plagiarism and get to the part of Hattic interest:
To Ridley are attributed two manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MSS Laud misc. 47a and 47b): one is a Russian-English dictionary containing 7203 entries, entitled ‘A dictionarie of the vulgar Russe tongue‘, the other an English-Russian dictionary (8113 entries), entitled ‘A dictionarie of the Englishe before the vulger Russe tonnge‘. The attribution depends primarily on comparison with an inscription by Ridley on the flyleaf of a Russian printed book (now in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge), presented by him in 1599 to Thomas Neville, dean of Canterbury and master of Trinity College. Being composed of words collected from the vernacular and uninfluenced by church Slavonic, the dictionaries often anticipate the evidence of other sources. They are not only the earliest dictionaries of Russian words with English equivalents, but also the first Russian dictionaries of any kind in the full sense, that is to say, arranged alphabetically and with the Russian words written in Cyrillic letters. A rudimentary Russian grammar on the first eight folios of the Russian-English dictionary is the earliest recorded. Both dictionaries also contain specialized vocabularies of words for birds, fishes, plants, and diseases.
A Dictionarie of the Vulgar Russe Tongue: Edited from the Late-sixteenth-century Manuscripts by Gerald Stone was published in 1996 and is available on Amazon for a mere $53.88 (Other Used from $53.88). Thanks, Stu!
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Following up Gilbert’s work, Ridley gives directions for carrying out experiments on the loadstone, magnet, and terrella.
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Ooh, I like the terrella!
Russian землица ‘little earth’ could be repurposed as a calque of that.
Fun fact: when I emigrated to NZ, my compass started behaving all peculiar, and was useless for navigating across the mountains. (This was long before GPS, of course.) I had to buy an Australasian compass. (Which BTW doesn’t work right in South America.)
“…but also the first Russian dictionaries of any kind in the full sense, that is to say, arranged alphabetically and with the Russian words written in Cyrillic letters.”
Sounds as a forced artifuicial excuse to push an earlier work out of the way…. but… strangely, I simply don’t know what is “the earliest” dictionary of Russian, but at least somewhat earlier Thevet’s dictionary is more like a phrasebook. As it was customary, “allez au bordeau” is one of the first entires: pouditty guebledan (I don’t understand why 2p though. Or is it how local damsels responded him and his companions?).
He also compiled a short vocabulary of Soqotri (without brothels).
mere $53.88
No. One bottle of beer, one book – as publications of Russian univerisity presses in 90s. Yes, often one bottle of Guinness rather than “бурштын Беларуси”, but I like both and they are not making бурштын anymore because large companies bought all breweries. No negotiations.
Here are some commentaries on the work and on select entries, by Vera Konnova:
https://www.academia.edu/35315476/Commentaries_to_Mark_Ridleys_A_Dictionarie_of_the_Vulgar_Russe_Tongue_
Does “the second son of the six children” imply that the first two children were boys or “the second son” and “six children” are two completely unrelated pieces of statistics? Apart obviously from that 2 is less than or equal 6.
i would parse the two as only tangentially related, only adding up to tell us that he wasn’t the firstborn child.