The grammar and rhetoric of Tudor and Stuart England prioritized words and word-like figures rather than sentences, a prioritizing that had significant consequences for linguistic representation.

Examining a wide range of historical sources - treatises, grammars, poems, plays, rhetorics, logics, dictionaries, and sermons - the author investigates how words matter as currency or memento, graphic symbol or template, icon or topos. She explores how words are the matter of fiction, of justice, of salvation, and of permanence: matters of life and death.

She also shows the historical and theoretical relevance to linguistic perception of distinctively creative writing, giving sustained attention to texts of Jonson, Andrewes, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne. These writers share a single linguistic universe, shaped only in part, but in significant part, by print and lexicography.