The conference will focus on the role of translation and lexical borrowing in the expansion of specific English lexicons (erudite, technical, or artisanal) as evidenced in printed texts from the early modern period. In an age of technical progress, geographic discoveries, easier communication, but also of growing interest in theorizing national literature and defining literary genres, how does multilingualism in print contribute to define specialised lexicons? What is the technical, but also the rhetorical import of the foreign words used in English texts? Are polyglot writers and speakers represented as particularly knowledgeable? Particular attention will be paid to translations (including self-translations) and to texts which feature a significant portion of non-English vocabulary in order to try and evidence potential correlations between the language used, the type of knowledge the author aims to share, the authority s/he intends to claim, and the targeted readership(s).