In a powerful and original contribution to the history of ideas, Hannah Dawson explores the intense preoccupation with language in earlymodern philosophy, and presents a groundbreaking analysis of John Locke’s critique of words. By examining a broad sweep of pedagogical and philosophical material from antiquity to the late seventeenth century, Dr Dawson explains why language caused anxiety in writers such as Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Gassendi, Nicole, Spinoza, Pufendorf, Boyle, Malebranche and Locke. Locke, Language and Early- Modern Philosophy demonstrates that new developments in philosophy, in conjunction with weaknesses in linguistic theory, resulted in serious concerns about the capacity of words to refer to the world, the stability of meaning, and the duplicitous power of words themselves