On the Antwerp-London Glossaries.

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.