Linda C. Mitchell, Grammar Wars: Language as Cultural Battlefield in 17th – and 18th – Century England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. viii + 218pp. ISBN 0754602729 The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries witnessed unprecedented attempts to describe and codify English grammar, yet this development has not received sufficient critical attention. Encompassing more than 300 individual works of the period, Linda C. Mitchell’s panoramic survey of grammar texts is a timely consideration of how scholars conceived of and defined the development of the vernacular in early modern England. Mitchell figures grammar as a site of intellectual and social debate, dividing the subject into five categories: contemporary efforts to standardize grammar, pedagogy, writing instruction, the search for a universal language (often encoded), and grammar in relation to social status. Her study focuses on individual theorists of English grammar, ranging from literary figures (Jonson, Milton, Swift) to university teachers (John Wallis, John Eachard), from cultivated women such as Bathsua Makin to educational reformers such as the Czech Johann Amos Comenius (Komensky) and Samuel Hartlib. Mitchell sets these individuals within the context of larger cultural shifts, particularly the gradual erosion of Latin as a pedagogical lingua franca. Her book frames a central debate between ‘prescriptive’ grammarians, who aimed to fix the language, and their ‘descriptive’ adversaries, who claimed that language changes, custom and habit should create a more elastic vernacular (p. 17). Within this structuring dichotomy, she makes the case for a movement away from the programmatic rigours of the scholastic and humanistic trivium towards concertedly vocational and belletristic uses of the English language. To illustrate this shift which gathered momentum during the last years of the seventeenth and first years of the eighteenth centuries, Mitchell refers to the humanist origins of vernacular grammar study, and places later grammarians in a continuum with sixteenth-century teachers such as William Lily and Pierre de la Ramée (Ramus). As well as considering the history of pedagogy in early modern England, Mitchell also discusses the theological and philosophical weight accorded to grammar during this period. In “Repairing Babel,” her fourth chapter (pp.108-132), for example, she charts the conception of would-be ‘Adamic’ or pre-Babel language systems during the seventeenth century, and details how epistemological principles such as Cartesian innatism and Locke’s notion of the mind as a tabula rasa informed contemporary grammar theory. Grammar Wars concentrates particularly on England, but other countries, particularly France, are used for comparison: for instance, Mitchell argues that the establishment of the Académie Française in 1635 caused some anxiety among English intellectuals and hastened efforts to standardize the vernacular (pp. 41-42). She uses the “putatively boring” subject of grammar (p. 5) to show how crucial debates over diction and syntax became as use of English as a pedagogical, scientific and commercial language increased. Sarah Knight University of Warwick