Ontario

287c_Ontario.jpg

1631 French map, titled Description du Pais des Hurons (Description of the Land of the Hurons) of the region between Lakes Huron and Ontario. In the upper left are portions of Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. The circular lake on the right that is labeled Lac Ouentarenk is now known as Lake Simcoe. In the lower right is a portion of Lake Ontario, labeled Partie du Lac Ontario. The location of present-day Toronto is on the depicted shoreline.

1 July 2021

Ontario is the name of one of the Great Lakes of North America and of the most populous province of Canada. The name is of Iroquoian origin, but which language and, therefore, its original meaning are uncertain. What is clear is that it was originally the name of the lake and became a name for the territory in English usage.

Ontario is a French spelling of the name. Some sources give the origin as the Kanienʼkéha (Mohawk) õtaríyo, or õtar (lake, river, waterway) + iyo (beautiful). Other sources give the origin as the Huron ontare (lake). And yet others say it means rocks near the water, referring to the Niagara Escarpment, through which the Niagara River flows, producing the spectacular Niagara Falls on its way into the lake’s southern end.

The French name appears on a map bearing the date 1631 (pictured), although the “3” has been overwritten with a “5,” giving a date of 1651. The current best estimate is that the map was drawn between 1639–48, with minor revisions after 1650, hence the changed date. A date from early in this span would make this map the earliest known use of the French name. The next candidate for earliest known use would be in the Jesuit Relations of 1641–42, which recounts the travels of missionaries to the region:

Du premier bourg de la Nation Neutre, que I'on rencontre y arriuant d'icy, continuant de cheminer au Midy ou Sudest, il y a enuiron quatre iournées de chemin iusques à l’emboucheure de la Riuiere si celebre de cette Nation, dans l'Ontario ou lac de S. Louys. Au deçà de cette Riuiere, & non au delà, comme le marque quelque Charte, sont la plus part des bourgs de la Nation Neutre. Il y en a trois ou quatre au delà, rangez d'Orient à I'Occident, vers la Nation du Chat, ou Erieehronõs.

(From the first village of the Neutral Nation which one finds on arriving there from this place, and continuing to travel South or Southeast, it is about four days journey to the entrance of the very famous River of that Nation, into the [Lake] Ontario or lake of St. Louis. On this side of that River—and not beyond it, as a certain map indicates—are the greater part of the villages of the Neutral Nation. There are three or four beyond, ranging from East to West, towards the Nation of the Cat, or Eriehurons.)

Ontario is used as the name of the lake in English by 1698, when it appears in a translation of an account of the travels through the Great Lakes region of René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle:

Every thing being ready for our departure, we set sail from Rochel, July 14. 1678. to the number of 30 Men, amongst whom were Pilots, Carpenters, Smiths and other useful Artists, and arrived at Quebec upon the 15th of September following; we remained there some days, after which having taken our Leave of Count Frontenac Governor-General of Canada, we sailed up the River St. Laurence to Fort Frontenac, where we landed.

That Fort lyes within 120 Leagues from Quebec, about the 44th Degree of Latitude, on the Mouth of a Lake called likewise Frontenac or Ontario, which is near 300 Leagues about, and has a communication with four other Lakes, much of the same extent.

The lake’s name was transferred to a territory in 1792, when the first county of Ontario was created. The province was officially named in 1867.

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Sources:

An Account of Monsieur de la Salle’s Last Expedition and Discoveries in North America. London: J. Tonson, 1698, 2–3. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents: Travels and Explorations of the Jesuit Missionaries in New France, 1610–1791, Quebec and Hurons, 1641–42, vol. 21. Reuben Gold Thwaites, ed. Cleveland: Burrows Brothers, 1898, 188–91. HathiTrust Digital Archive. https://www.hathitrust.org/

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Ontarian, n. and adj.

Rayburn, Alan. Oxford Dictionary of Canadian Place Names. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP Canada, 1999.

Image credit: Unknown cartographer, 1631. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

Brunswick / New Brunswick

British Revolutionary War map of New Brunswick, New Jersey, c.1777. A pen-and-ink and watercolor drawing, showing topographic relief by shading of an area crossed by the Raritan River. Roads, troop positions, and military emplacements are shown and numbered, with a key at the bottom identifying them.

British Revolutionary War map of New Brunswick, New Jersey, c.1777. A pen-and-ink and watercolor drawing, showing topographic relief by shading of an area crossed by the Raritan River. Roads, troop positions, and military emplacements are shown and numbered, with a key at the bottom identifying them.

29 June 2021

Brunswick is a city in Lower Saxony whose name comes from the Middle Low German Burnswik, from Brun (Bruno) + wik (settlement). The city was legendarily founded by Bruno, Duke of Saxony, in 861. The modern name is Braunschweig,

The North American New Brunswicks, a province in Canada and a city in New Jersey, United States, are named after the Hanoverian English kings George III and George I, respectively, who also held the title of Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg.

Of course, there were people living in the places that are called New Brunswick before Europeans settled there and renamed them. The inhabitants of the province of New Brunswick at the time of European contact were the Mi'kmaq, the Maliseet, and the Passamaquoddy. Since the province is a settler-colonist construct, I don’t know of an indigenous name that corresponds to the province as a whole, but the capital, Fredericton is located near the site of the Maliseet settlement of Ekwpahak (end of the tide) and the largest city in the province, Moncton, is located at a place known to the Mi’kmaq as Amalamgog (the delta where the multicolored rivers meet).

The indigenous inhabitants of the area containing the New Jersey city of New Brunswick were the Lenape or Delaware, who refer to their land as Lenapehoking (land of the Lenape). Lenapehoking encompassed all of what is called by settler-colonists New Jersey and the surrounding parts of New York (including all of New York City), Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware.

Of the two, the city in New Jersey has borne the name New Brunswick for longer, since at least 1735, when this advertisement appeared in the New-York Weekly Journal on 9 February:

To be Sold,

The Real Estate in the Provinces of New-York and New-Jersey, whereof Major General Hunter, deceased, died seized, consisting of the following Particulars, viz.

1. The House and Lott on the Dock near the Ferry Stars of New-York, in which Coll. Lurting, late Mayor of this City lived.

[...]

5. A 500 Acre Lott of Land on the South Side of the Raritan River, about 3 Miles above New-Brunswick, formerly Richard Jones’s, lying between Governour Barclay’s Lott and Clement’s Lott.

The Canadian province was separated from Nova Scotia in 1784, and a notice of the appointment of the province’s first governor is recorded on 28 July of that year:

28. The hon. William Wesley Pole, appointed by the lord lieutenant of Ireland to be governor of the Queen’s county.

—. Colonel Thomas Carleton, to be captain-general and governor in chief of the province of New Brunswick.

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Sources:

“Advertisement.” New-York Weekly Journal, 9 February 1735, 4.

Brookes, Alan and William W. Thorpe. “Fredericton.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 6 March 2019.

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2020, s.v. Brunswick, n.

Pearce, Margaret Wickens. Coming Home to Indigenous Place Names in Canada (map). Canadian-American Center, University of Maine, 2017.

“Principal Occurrences in the Year 1784.” The New Annual Register or General Repository of History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1784. London: G.G.J. and J. Robinson, 1785, 117. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Rayburn, Alan. Oxford Dictionary of Canadian Place Names. Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford UP Canada, 1999.

Image credit: Alexander Sutherland and John Hills, c.1777. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

Virginia / West Virginia

1606 map of the Tidewater region of Virginia, showing the colony of Jamestown, among others. In the upper left is an image of the Powhatan, the chief of the Tsenacommacah. In the upper right is an indigenous hunter/warrior, carrying a bow, a club, and the body of an animal he has killed.

1606 map of the Tidewater region of Virginia, showing the colony of Jamestown, among others. In the upper left is an image of the Powhatan, the chief of the Tsenacommacah. In the upper right is an indigenous hunter/warrior, carrying a bow, a club, and the body of an animal he has killed.

25 June 2021

Tsenacommacah is the Powhatan term for the Tidewater region and surrounding lands in what is now commonly called Virginia. The word was also used to refer to a socio-political grouping of Algonquian peoples living there, the Powhatan Confederacy. The meaning of Tsenacommacah is somewhat uncertain, but it is often translated as “densely inhabited land,” a compound of tsen (close together) + ahkamikwi (land dwelt upon, dwelling house).

But when English settler-colonists founded their first colonies there, they dubbed the land Virginia, after Elizabeth I, the so-called virgin queen. Originally, Virginia referred to all English claims to North America, not just the area we now know by that name. But since the first successful English colony was in the Tidewater at Jamestown, the name eventually came to mean that and immediately surrounding areas and not other colonies elsewhere on the Eastern seaboard.

The earliest use of Virginia that I have found is from Walter Bigges’s account of Francis Drake’s 1585–86 expedition to raid the Spanish colonies in the Americas. Bigges was one of Drake’s ship captains. The passage refers to Drake’s June 1586 resupply of the Roanoke colony, which was in what is now North Carolina, but in the sixteenth century that was all Virginia. The reference to St. Helena is to St. Helena Island in what is now South Carolina and not to the island in the South Atlantic where Napoleon was exiled:

Here it was resolued in full assemblie of Captaines, to vndertake the enterprise of S. HELENA, and from thence to seeke out the inhabitation of our English countrey men in VIRGINIA, distant from thence some sixe degrees Northward.

When we came thwart of S. HELENA, the shols appearing daungerous, and we hauing no Pilot to vndertake the entrie, it was thought meetest to go hence alongst. For the Admirall had bene the same night in foure fadome and halfe three leagues from the shore: and yet we vnderstood, that by the helpe of a knowen Pilot, there may and doth go in ships of greater burthen and draught then anie we had in our Fleete.

We passed thus alongest the coast hard abord the shore, which is shallow for a league or two from the shore, and the same is lowe and broken land for the most part.

The ninth of Iune vpon sight of one speciall great fire (which are verie ordinarie all alongst this coast, euen from the Cape FLORIDA hither) the Generall sent his Skiffe to the shore, where they found some of our English countrey men (that had bene sent thither the yeare before by Sir Walter Raleigh) & brought one aboord, by whose direction we proceeded along to the place, which they make their Port. But some of our ships being of great draught vnable to enter, we ankered all without the harbour in a wild road at sea, about two miles from shore.

From whence the General wrote letters to Maister Rafe Lane, being Gouernour of those English in VIRGINIA, and then at his fort about six leagues from the rode in an Island, which they call ROANOAC, wherein specially he shewed how readie he was to supply his necessities and wants, which he vnderstood of, by those he had first talked withall.

The morrowe after Maister Lane him selfe and some of his companie comming vnto him, with the consent of his Captaines, he gaue them the choise of two offers, that is to say: Either he would leaue a ship, a Pinnace, and certaine boates with sufficient Maisters and mariners, together furnished with a moneths victuall to stay and make farther discouerie of the country and coastes, and so much victuall likewise that might be sufficient for the bringing of them all (being an hundred and three persons) into England if they thought good after such time, with anie other thing they would desire, & that he might be able to spare.

Or else if they thought they had made sufficient discouerie alreadie, and did desire to returne into England, he would giue them passage. But they as it seemed, being desirous to stay, accepted verie thankefully, and with great gladnesse that which was offred first.

Drake and his crew would be the last white men to see the ill-fated colonists of Roanoke.

Subsequently, Jamestown would become the first successful English colony in North America, and Virginia would be among the thirteen colonies that rebelled against Britain in 1775. On 25 June 1788, it became the tenth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution. The western region of the state, which had relatively few slaves and little political or commercial interest in breaking with the Union during the Civil War, split from the eastern portion of the state, becoming the state of West Virginia on 20 June 1863.

I also chanced upon 1609 use of Virginia that, while far from the first use of that name, is fascinating in its own right. It’s from the dedicatory epistle to a published version of a sermon delivered by William Symonds on 25 April 1609 in Southwark, London to an audience of prospective planters in Virginia:

This land, was of old time, offered to our Kings. Our late Soueraigne Q. Elizabeth (whose storie hath no peere among Princes of her sexe) being a pure Virgin, found it, set foot in it, and called it Virginia. Our most sacred Soueraigne, in whom is the spirit of his great Ancestor, Constantin t[h]e pacifier of the world, and planter of the Gospell in places most remote, desireth to present this land a pure Virgine to Christ. Such as doe mannage the expedition, are carefull to carry thither no Traitors, nor Papists that depend on the Great Whore. Lord finish this good worke thou hast begun; and marry this land, a pure Virgine to thy kingly sonne Christ Iesus; so shall thy name bee magnified: and we shall haue a Virgin or Maiden Britaine, a comfortable addition to our Great Britaine.

Of course, Elizabeth herself never “set foot” in North America, but the passage is representing the dual nature of the monarch’s body—the physical human body and the body of the nation she rules. It is this latter body that set foot in and established colonies in North America. The passage also invokes the Roman Emperor Constantine, who was campaigning in Britain when he became Emperor. By so doing it compares the current king, James I, who by establishing the Virginia colonies brought Christianity to the region, to the emperor who established Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire. And Symonds refers to America as “a Virgin or Maiden Britaine,” a place that, since it is untouched by sin, can be perfected as a Christian nation—a sentiment that was shared by the later Puritan colonists of New England, but not by the Virginia colonists, who were in it solely for the profit. The idea of “virgin” land also necessitates the erasure of the indigenous people already living there and is why today we call it Virginia and not Tsenacommacah.

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Sources:

Bigges, Walter. A Summarie and True Discourse of Sir Francis Drakes West Indian Voyage. London: Richard Field, 1589, 47–49. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Everett-Heath, John. Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, sixth ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2020. Oxfordreference.com.

Gleach, Frederic W. Powhatan’s World and Colonial Virginia: A Conflict of Cultures. Lincoln: U of Nebraska Press, 1997, 25, 207.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. Virginia, n.

Symonds, William. “Dedicatorie Epistle.” A Sermon Preached at White-Chappel, in the Presence of Many, Honourable and Worshipfull, the Aduenturers and Planters for Virginia, 25 April 1609. London: I. Windet, 1609, unpaginated front matter. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Whitt, Laurelyn and Alan W. Clarke. “The Powhatan Tsenacommacah (1607–1677).” North American Genocides: Indigenous Nations, Settler Colonialism, and International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2019, 117.

Image credit: John Smith and William Hole, 1606 (published 1624). Library of Congress. Public domain image.

shrew / shrewd

24 June 2021

1791 cartoon by James Gillray titled, The Taming of the Shrew: Katherine & Petruchio; — The Modern Quixotte, or, What You Will. The cartoon critiques the British attempt, with Prussian and Dutch support, to negotiate a truce in the Russia-Turkish War (1787–92). It depicts Catherine the Great of Russia fainting into the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and a figure representing France, while English Prime Minister William Pitt, as Don Quixote, points accusingly at Catherine, while he sits astride Rocinante, representing King George III of England. Sitting on the horse behind Pitt are the king of Prussia and a Sancho Panza figure representing Holland. Ottoman Sultan Selim III kneels behind the horse and kisses its tail. Russia, supported by France and the Holy Roman Empire, and is winning the war wants nothing to do with a negotiated peace, while Turkey, which is losing badly, desperately wants the war to end. George III, depicted as an emaciated and scarred, horse, simply does what Pitt tells him.

1791 cartoon by James Gillray titled, The Taming of the Shrew: Katherine & Petruchio; — The Modern Quixotte, or, What You Will. The cartoon critiques the British attempt, with Prussian and Dutch support, to negotiate a truce in the Russia-Turkish War (1787–92). It depicts Catherine the Great of Russia fainting into the arms of the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II and a figure representing France, while English Prime Minister William Pitt, as Don Quixote, points accusingly at Catherine, while he sits astride Rocinante, representing King George III of England. Sitting on the horse behind Pitt are the king of Prussia and a Sancho Panza figure representing Holland. Ottoman Sultan Selim III kneels behind the horse and kisses its tail. Russia, supported by France and the Holy Roman Empire, and is winning the war wants nothing to do with a negotiated peace, while Turkey, which is losing badly, desperately wants the war to end. George III, depicted as an emaciated and scarred, horse, simply does what Pitt tells him.

A shrew is a small, insectivorous and carnivorous mammal of the genus Sorex. The common shrew, Sorex araneus, is found across Eurasia, from Mongolia to Britain. They resemble mice but are not rodents, being more closely related to moles and hedgehogs. But shrew also has a misogynist sense of a nagging, scolding, unpleasant woman. This latter sense of shrew is perhaps best known to people today through Shakespeare’s play The Taming of the Shrew. And this latter sense gave rise to the adjective shrewd, which now means clever or keen-witted, but originally meant something more malicious.

These two senses are difficult to reconcile. The general opinion is that the scold sense is a metaphorical development of the animal sense, coming from a folk belief that the creature wielded some malignant influence. Alternatively, the scold sense could have an independent origin, a borrowing of the Middle High German word schröuwel, meaning devil. Adding to the word’s strangeness is that it, or the animal sense at least, has no cognates in other Germanic languages, and its root meaning is unclear.

The name of the animal comes to us from the Old English screwa, a word that is attested in a number of Latin-Old English glossaries. Strangely, this sense isn’t attested in Middle English, reappearing in print in the sixteenth century. (There are many gaps in the early medieval corpus, but the Middle English corpus is quite large and filled with animal terms, so the word’s absence is odd.) One of the early reappearances of the animal sense is in Thomas Elyot’s 1542 Latin-English dictionary, in which Elyot gives a hint of the folkloric malign nature of the small creature:

Mus Arancus, a kynde of myse called a shrew, whyche yf it goo ouer a beastes backe, he shall be lame in the chyne, yf he doo byte any thynge, it swelleth vp to the hart, and the beaste dyeth.

(Mus Arancus, a kind of mouse called a shrew, which if it goes over a beast’s back, the beast shall be lame in the spine, if he does bite anything, the beast bitten swells up, and the beast bitten dies.)

While the animal sense isn’t attested in Middle English, the other sense of the word is. The earliest uses of the word shreue are in the sense of a rascal, an undisciplined child, an evil-doer,  but it is not specifically associated with women. An early appearance is in the debate-poem The Owl and the Nightingale from c. 1275:

Vor nere ich neuer no þe betere,
Yif ich mid chauling & mid chatere,
Home schende, & mid fule worde,
So herdes doþ, oþer mid schitworde.
Ne lust me with þe screwen chide:
Forþi ich wende from hom wide.
Hit is a wise monne dome,
& hi hit segget wel ilome,
Þat “me ne chide wit þe gidie”
Ne “wit þan ofne me ne ʒonie.”

(For I would not be better off if I abused them with idle talk and chatter and with foul words, as shepherds do, or with shit-words. I don’t want to quarrel with the shrews, therefore I give them a wide berth. It’s the judgment of wise men, & they say it often, that “there is no point in arguing with an idiot” than there is “yawning wider than an oven.”)

Shreue could also refer to a devil or a sinner, as in the life of St. James found in the South English Legendary, written c.1300. In this passage, a sinner kills himself and the devil claims his soul:

A-ʒein þe deuel he cam a-doun : and bad þane schrewe a-bide,
And seid, “þou berst more þane þin owe. : þat i schal kuyþe þe.
Ʒwi hast þou mine pilegrim be-traid? : gret schame þou dest me.”
“Ʒe. al for nauʒt,” quath þe schrewe : “thou art hidere i-come[”] :
[“]In his sunne him-sulf he a-slouʒ : and þare-with ich him habbe i-nome.
Ne may no man in dedlich sunne : in-to heuene wende.
Ase wel þou miʒht gon hom a-ʒein : he is min with-outen enden.”

(Again, the devil he came down and bid that the shrew wait, and said “you carry more than your own [sin], that I shall let you know. Why have you betrayed my pilgrim? You do me great shame.” “Yes, all for nothing,” said the shrew, “you have come here.” “In his sin he killed himself, and therefore I have taken him. No one in mortal sin can go to heaven, any more easily as he can go home again. He is mine without end.”

It’s about this time that the adjective shrewd appears with the meaning of wicked or malicious. In a passage about Pilate’s judgment of Christ, shrewd is used as an antisemitic slur from the Southern Passion, a poem that is part of the South English Legendary, written c.1280:

And Pilatus nas no gyw; Iustise þey he were,
Ak was of Paynyme; and þorw þemperour ysend ffram Rome
ffor to entempry þe gywes; and hold hem to riȝte dome.
Out aȝen þe shrewede gywes; pilatus wende anon
To affonge hare acoupementʒ; whanne he nolde yn gon.

(And Pilate was no Jew; ruler though he was,
But rather he was a pagan; and by the emperor sent from Rome
To restrain the Jews; and hold them to honest judgment.
Out again [among] the shrewd Jews, Pilate soon went
To hear their accusations when they would not come in.)

This sense of evil could also be applied to dangerous animals or things, as well as to misbehaving children.

The misogynistic association with women appears by the early fourteenth century, as can be seen in this lyric, “Lord that Lenest Us Lyf.,” found in the manuscript London, British Library, MS Harley 2253:

Nou hath prude the pris
In everuche plawe;
By mony wymmon unwis
Y sugge mi sawe,
For yef a ledy lyne is
Leid after lawe,
Uch a strumpet that ther is
Such drahtes wol drawe
             In prude:
       Uch a screwe wol hire shrude
       Thah he nabbe nout a smoke hire foule ers to hude!

(Today, pride takes the praise in every amusement; by the example of many unwise women I state my opinion, for if a lady’s clothing is fitted after fashion, each strumpet that there is will follow such tricks out of pride, each shrew will adorn herself up, though she hasn’t a smock to hide her foul ass.)

And the sense of a nagging or disagreeable wife can be found in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, c.1395. where the host, Harry Bailey, responds to the merchant’s tale with the following:

"Ey! Goddes mercy!" seyde oure Hooste tho,
"Now swich a wyf I pray God kepe me fro!
Lo, whiche sleightes and subtilitees
In wommen been! For ay as bisy as bees
Been they, us sely men for to deceyve,
And from the soothe evere wol they weyve;
By this Marchauntes tale it preveth weel.
But doutelees, as trewe as any steel
I have a wyf, though that she povre be,
But of hir tonge, a labbyng shrewe is she,
And yet she hath an heep of vices mo.

(“Ah, God’s mercy!” said our host then, “Now such a wife I pray God keep me from! Lo, what slights and subtleties are in women! For they are always as busy as bees, to deceive us innocent men, and from the truth they will ever waver; by this merchant’s tale it is well proven. But doubtless, as true as any steel I have a wife, though she is poor, but of her tongue she is a blabbing shrew, and yet she has a heap of other vices.”)

The adjective shrewd was also applied specifically to scolding or nagging women at about this time. From John Trevisa’s c.1387 translation of Ranulf Higden’s Polychronicon:

Socrates hadde tweie schrewed wifes þat would alway chide and stryve, and hadde ofte stryf by twene hem for Socrates.

(Socrates had two shrewd wives that would always quarrel and argue, and there was often strife between them over Socrates.)

Higden’s original Latin uses litigiosissimas (most quarresome). Another, anonymous, Middle English translator uses litigious and malicious.

But by the early sixteenth century, shrewd was being used to mean clever or keen-witted, an outgrowth of the idea of a malicious act being sharp and penetrating. This sense appears in a 1525 interlude by John Rastell on the qualities of women, although while the attitude displayed here is sexist, the adjective shrewd is applied to men, not women:

Gyff tokyns of loue by many subtell ways
Semyng to be shepe and serpently shrewd
Craft in them renewyng that neuer decays
Theyre seyenge sightynge prouokynge theyr plays
O what payn is to fulfyll theyre appetyte
And to accomplysh theyre wanton delytis

(Give tokens of love by many subtle ways
Seeming to be sheep and serpently shrewd
Craft in them renewing that never decays
Their saying sighting provoking their plays
O what a pain it is to fulfill their appetite
And to accomplish their wanton delights.)

Over time, the adjective shrewd has lost its misogynistic undertones.

Regardless of whether this misogynistic sense of shrew comes from a slander of an innocent animal or from an old German word for devil, its derogatory and slanderous nature makes it not a good word to use unless, one is referring to the title of the Shakespeare play, and even then, one should avoid it as much as possible.

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Sources:

(For those interested in reading more about medieval misogyny, I point you to the work of Carissa M. Harris, whose forthcoming book and talks on the topic have influenced my thinking about the word shrew. As of this writing however, I would recommend her Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Cornell UP, 2018). That book does not address misogyny or shrew in particular, but it does address medieval attitudes toward and language about women more generally.)

Brown, Beatrice Daw. The Southern Passion. Early English Text Society OS 169. London: Humphrey Milford, 1927, lines 1282–86, 46–47. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2344.

Cartlidge, Neil, ed. The Owl and the Nightingale. Exeter: U of Exeter Press, 2001, 8–9, lines 283–93. London, British Library, Cotton Caligula A.9.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “Epilogue to the Merchant’s Tale.” The Canterbury Tales, lines 4:2419–29. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website. Elyot, Thomas. Bibliotheca Eliotæ Eliotis Librarie. London: Thomas Bertelet, 1542, sig. Y.3

Fein, Susanna Greer, ed. “Lord that Lenest Us Lyf.” The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, vol. 2 of 3. TEAMS Middle English Text Series. Kalamazoo, Michigan: Medieval Institute Publications, 2014, lines 12–22. London, British Library, MS Harley 2253.

Higden, Ranulf. Polychronicon Ranulphi Higden, vol. 3 of 8. Joseph Rawson Lumby, ed. Rolls Series (Rerum Britannicarum Medii Aevi Scriptores) 41. London: Longman, et al., 1871, 3.285, 284–85. Cambridge, St. John's College, MS H.1 (204). London, British Library, MS Harley 2261.

Horstmann, Carl, ed. The Early South-English Legendary. Early English Text Society, OS 87.. London: N. Trübner, 1887, 44, lines 347–53. HathiTrust Digital Archive. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108, Part 1.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. shreue, n., bishreuen, v., shrewd, adj.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. shrew, n.1, shrew, n.2 and adj., shrewd, adj.

Rastell, John. A New Comodye in Englysh In Maner of an Enterlude Ryght Elygant & Full of Craft of Rethoryk, Wherein Is Shewd & Descrybyd as Well the Bewte & Good Propertes of Women. London, 1525, sig. A.3. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Image credit: James Gillray, 1791, Library of Congress. Public domain image.