On the Antwerp-London Glossaries.

Publication: The Journal of English and Germanic Philology

Publication Date: 01-APR-99

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COPYRIGHT 1999 University of Illinois Press

In the early eleventh century, a group of Anglo-Saxon schoolmen made additions to several related manuscripts. Working perhaps at Abingdon,(1) they annotated the grammar Excerptiones Prisciani (Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum 16.2 + London, BL Add. 32246); Boethius's De consolatione philosophiae (Plantin-Moretus Museum 16.8); and Aldhelm's prose De virginitate (Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale 1650).(2) They lavished attention on the Aldhelm, covering available space with thousands of glosses laid down in perceptible layers. Their scholarly interest expressed itself again in thousands of entries in six glossaries, Latin-Latin and Latin-English, of the most miscellaneous character, scattered throughout the manuscripts. Taken as a whole, these 10,000 scholia and glosses speak eloquently of Anglo-Saxon school traditions. Yet because philological bias has blurred any overall plan of work, these witnesses are just beginning to speak. Past analyses, often piecemeal studies of the minority of items with English, have addressed in isolation either the Aldhelm glosses or the vocabularies loosely called the Antwerp-London glossary or glossaries. So despite the publication of much of this valuable material, no connected accounts characterize the late Anglo-Saxon scholarship which these manuscripts evidence.

What follows is a prolegomenon to such an account, an attempt to gather together published observations about these scribes and their methods of work and further to synthesize them with the conclusions of my own recent research. Concentrating here on the glossarial material, I analyze the six lists (designated articles 1 through 6) in terms of substance and arrangement, and give manuscript settings alongside information on editions. The conclusion sets out the prerequisites for an eventual comprehensive study that promises a vivid picture of Anglo-Saxon school texts and the environment that produced them.

Two hands wrote the six glossaries (one in the Brussels, five in the Antwerp-London manuscript). The first hand produced five lists (articles 1-5) amounting to some 1300 entries; the second hand, working after the first had finished, set down about twice as many entries in a single list (article 6).

HAND 1

Article 1. Brussels, BR 1650, outer margin of fo. 55v. First edited as a footnote to Aldhelm, the glossary is now available in an electronic edition.(3) This 23-item vocabulary of miscellaneous character shows neither alphabetization nor grouping by subject. To use the common terminology, it is neither an alphabetical nor a class glossary, and so it escapes traditional categorization.

A number of the lemmata are Greek, for example, mesochorus, pistis, canon, and so forth. The single English interpretation, holen, "holly," glosses Latin ruscus. As for sources, a batch of glossae collectae from 3 Regum 7, 33 shows the list's dependence on existing glossary material: cantus, rote, modiolus.(4) Other entries also probably came from existing glossaries. The item "ruscus sci. holen," for example, has analogues in the Leiden glossary, in Epinal-Erfurt,(5) and in Corpus (R245). The compiler may also have borrowed from the most widely influential school text of the early Middle Ages, Isidore's Etymologiae.(6) The entry

Obolus grece . latine sagitta. [Obolus in Greek is sagitta in Latin.]

repeats Isidore's derivation,

[Obolos] fiebat enim olim ex aere ad instar sagittae. Unde et nomen a Graecis accepit, hoc est sagitta. (16.25.11) [Oboloi (weights) were once made from bronze in the shape of an arrow, whence they get the Greek name meaning arrow.]

rendering a meaning not attested in the Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum.(7)

Article 2. Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus Museum 16.2, outer margin of fo. 43v. Resembling article 1 in having a number of Greek loans (items 1, 4-9, 11-12), article 2 is a class glossary of twelve Latin-Latin items, mostly pertaining to the parts of a Roman house.(8) The list falls midway between the q- and s-batches of the a-order alphabetical list (article 4, which has no r-batch), to which it has no connection.

Proaula ("vestibule") Salutatorium ("greeting place") Consistorium ("assembly place") Triclinium ("dining place") 5 Zetas hiemales ("winter houses") Zetas aestiuales ("summer houses") Epicaustorium ("place for deciding cases") Thermas ("bath houses") Agonitheta ("combatant") 10 Gimnasia ("gymnasium," "place of exercise") Ganeo ("tavern keeper") Ypodromum ("cellar")

Comparison of article 2 with a nearly identical list in London, BL Harley 3826 and in turn with their ultimate source, the continental glossary De Domiciliis,(9) suggests an interesting textual derivation. The two English lists represent an Insular recension with rearrangement, omissions, and additions. In item 4, for example, they substitute triclinium for tricorum, and they interpolate items 9 and 11.

A related sequence of lemmata occurs in a discrete batch of the Antwerp-London class list (article 6).(10)

Proaula Salutatorium Zems aestiuales consistorium Tricorum uel triclinium Zetas hyemales Epicaustorium Thermas Gimnasium Coquina uel culina Colimbus .i. aquaductus Ypodromum uel spondoromum

Though this sequence lacks the interpolations and omissions of article 2, rearrangements and shared readings indicate a close textual relationship. This segment of article 6, one supposes, is a bilingual version of the text from which the ancestor of article 2 was adapted.(11)

According to Lindsay, item 11, a Corpus item, originates from the grammar of Phocas (Corpus, Epinal, Erfurt and Leyden Glossaries, p. 16). Item 9 (agonitheta) repeats a meaning attested only in Book 3 of Abbo's Bella Parisiacae Urbis and in its source, the Scholica graecarum glossarum,(12) Interestingly, hand 1 reproduced item 9 verbatim in writing a text gloss to the Brussels Aldhelm on folio 1v: "agonitheta, certator" (Goossens, 150.57).

Article 3. Antwerp, fos. 48rv, originally blank pages at the end of the manuscript (Ker, Catalogue, no. 2, art. e). The 103 items written margin to margin across the page are of mixed character, showing neither grouping by category nor consistent alphabetization. Several strings of lemmata in a- and ab-order (e.g., five words beginning with a, six with t) may show the list to be a first stage of alphabetizing, the compiler gathering his headwords here in rough and ready fashion to be copied in stricter alphabetical order elsewhere. A cognate list with about half article 3's contents has no such alphabetization (London, BL Harley 3271, fo. 121v). In article 3, Greek is again common (e.g., asbestos, parenthesis, anastasis, simphonia, stigma, etc.) and English rare. Ker, p. 2, gives the English: forewenednessa glossing insolentiam, widlese and goretende glossing passiuis. I have traced headwords to four likely sources: a glossary related to the Corpus glossary; the Etymologiae; Book 3 of Abbo's Bella Parisiacae Urbis; and scholia to the Excerptiones Prisciani (the main text of Antwerp-London). Here illustrative examples from article 3 are juxtaposed with probable sources.

Article 3 Corpus Glossary Veredarius, .i. uelox, ut Veredari . ueloces . nunti pennatus nuntius. dicuntur (U118) Essedum, i., uehiculum. Essedum . uehiculum (E312) Erebus, infernus. Erebum . profundum . infernum (E277) Etymologiae Parenthesis, i.e., Parenthesis ubi interponimus interpositio sententiam nostram ... (1.37.18). Angelium, nuntiatio, quia Evangelium autem interpretatur angelus grece, nuntius bona adnuntiatio. Graece enim latine dicitur, eu bonum, angelia adnuntiatio dicitur. Unde et angelus nuntius interpretatur (6.2.43). Subcinctorium .i. perizomatum ... perizomatum, id est uel campestria ... subcinctorium ... Haec et campestria nuncupantur (19.22.5). Scholia to the Excerptiones Chaos . confusio rerum Chaos. primordialis confusio rerum antequam diuiderentur ab inuicem (fo. London 15v) ... tabellarius ... .i. Tabellarius. tabellam habens portitor tabulae uel scriptor uel portans (fo. London 6v) Stigma. similitudo auri uel Stigma. similitudo auri uel argenti est argenti est (fo. Antwerp 5r) Abbo Buteo . adolescens buteonem, iuuenem (120.96) stoma .i. os. crison . aurum crisostomus, os aureum habens (117.94)

If Corpus and Abbo are direct sources, then the cited items have been lexicalized, rendered in the nominative singular. Other items, however, resemble interpretive glosses to a Latin text. The inflected forms insolentiam and passiuis, for example, stand out among the standardized nominatives. Article 3 is as yet unpublished; I am preparing an edition.

Article 4 (Ker, Catalogue, no. 2, art. b). Slightly fewer than 1000 items, mostly Latin-Latin, in an a-order alphabetical list, letters A through S, arranged by folios as in the table below. Given the unsystematic dismembering of the manuscript and the subsequent difficulty in describing the disposition of the glossary, I provide a table concording current folio numbers with the original foliation of the complete manuscript (after Forster's foliation, p. 97, and with references to Kindschi's unpublished edition).

letter folio Kindschi a Antwerp 3r-London 3r (3r-5r) 38.1-43.20 b London 5r (7r) 65.6-66.4 c London 8r-9v (11r-12v) 112.15-117.9, 120.1-121.1 d London 12rv (15rv) 148.13-150.18 e Antwerp 4r (19r) 189.17-192.9 f Antwerp 8rv (23rv) 195.10-197.3...

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