Prototype dynamics in the Restoration vernacular print: A diachronic onomastic study of Poor Robin’s Almanack

Abstract

This study quantifies the internal semantics of the mock-saint calendars that appeared annually in Poor Robin’s Almanack between 1664 and 1674, the most widely circulated comic almanac of Restoration London. From ten digitized issues a corrected onomastic corpus of 2728 tokens was compiled; every name is time-stamped by month and year, classified under one of eight narrative roles — Heroes & Knights, Lovers, Magic & Supernatural, Notorious Women, Outlaws & Rogues, Sages & Satirists, Tricksters & Fools, and Tyrants & Traitors — and tagged for cultural provenance (Greek myth, broadside ballad, contemporary pamphlet, etc.). Token frequency serves as an historical production norm; the category concentration and intra-class typicality translate that frequency into prototype strength. Results reveal a graded folk taxonomy. Lovers and Heroes & Knights form tight, myth-anchored nuclei dominated by a handful of classical and romance figures, whereas Tricksters & Fools and Tyrants & Traitors display deliberately flat profiles open to continual topical additions. Provenance tags show a strong correlation between lexical concentration and cultural homogeneity: categories with high concentration draw most of their tokens from a single narrative pool, while diffuse categories recruit names from five or more source domains. Diachronically, the calendar’s centre of gravity first shifts toward political invective, then toward jest-book humor, quantifying how popular print renegotiates the sacred–profane boundary in step with shifting political climates and the taste for novelty. Methodologically, the article demonstrates that fixed-format onomastic satire can be mined much like production norms: name extraction, semantic tagging, prototype metrics and diachronic slicing together provide an alternative for historical cognitive linguistics.