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Fremantle’s reveling in historical detail offers a good deal of pleasure to the reader, but it tends to compromise her decision to have her characters speak in a casual and decidedly 21st-century lexis.

She acknowledges what that same critic called Lowe-Porter’s “errors of lexis, syntax and tense; unexplained omissions; unjustified rephrasings,” yet goes on to imply that such shortcomings are inevitable — that translation is an unverifiable mystery.

Aimed at “Ladies, gentlewomen and other unskillful persons”, it listed approximately 2,500 “hard usuall words”, less than 5% of the lexis in use at the time.

“The Essex Serpent” is also an example of what the nature writer Robert Macfarlane calls “a word-hoard of the astonishing lexis for landscape.”

Projects are presently under way around the world to gain the most basic of purchases on the Anthropocene – a lexis with which to reckon it.