"Exhilarating. Ossa-Richardson's richly textured book makes a huge contribution to our understanding of the full spectrum of ways--and reasons why--words mean more than one thing." --Reid Barbour, author of Sir Thomas Browne: A Life "This unequivocally brilliant book traces the tortuous evolution of ambiguity from a vice in ancient rhetoric to creative poetic indeterminacy in the twentieth century. Beginning and ending with William Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity , this rich and challenging study ranges widely across scriptural hermeneutics, theology, legal history, classical philology, and literary criticism. An almost impossible story told with verve, erudition, and wit." --Stephen Clucas, Birkbeck, University of London "For anyone who imagines that the history of ambiguity begins with William Empson, this book will come as a revelation. Anthony Ossa-Richardson presents an alternative history of ambiguity in which Empson and the New Critics are the end point rather than the beginning. In a work of thrilling ambition--ranging across biblical criticism, classical translation, religious polemic, and legal hermeneutics--he recovers a lost tradition of medieval and early modern scholarship which, rather than trying to eliminate ambiguity, reveled in its power and possibility.

A History of Ambiguity takes its readers on a voyage of discovery into uncharted waters which will not only expand their horizons but redraw their map of intellectual history." -- Arnold Hunt, University of Cambridge "Few scholars can be trusted to lead you from Aristotle and Augustine, through the deepest forests of early modern intellectual history, to emerge ready for modern literary thickets. You can trust Ossa-Richardson. In showing how Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity transformed vice into virtue, he untangles the origins of modern criticism with a rare combination of scholarship and playfulness." --Richard Oosterhoff, University of Edinburgh "This remarkable book is full of insights, wonderfully learned and often funny." --Michael Wood, author of On Empson.