When Henry VIII charged John Palsgrave with teaching his sister French, there were no dictionaries or grammars of either French or English. In Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse, a vast work of over 1000 pages, this brilliant priest and linguist, with a dramatist's eye for contempora ry life and an ear for colloquial idiom, provided the first bilingual dictionary and contrastive grammar of the two languages. Stein presents a detailed study of his achievement.