'Il glossario del ms. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 163’ (English version) (original) (raw)

Romanobarbarica 10 (1988-1989), pp. 485-516. -Rist. riv. e corr. in Anglo-Saxon Glosses and Glossaries, 1999, pp. 329-355.

Glosses constituted a meeting-point between Latin culture and the Germanic world, a moment when the two civilizations came face to face. The latter attempted to set up a relationship with the former and build a bridge across to it. Consequently, the glossator sought not only to understand and then record the meaning of a more or less obscure word, but also to interpret the text in which this word occurred. His aim was to send forth an echo of the word, selecting it from among many others either for teaching purposes or simply for personal enjoyment. That these and other reasons, such as an interest in compiling or writing encyclopedias, were the basis of medieval glossarial activity is often overlooked: the characteristic approach to glosses is almost exclusively a linguistic one. This has led to the treatment of interlinear glosses in isolation from the contexts in which they occur and, where a text contains glosses in both Latin and the vernacular, or where a glossary, as frequently happens, alternates monolingual and bilingual interpretamenta, only the Old English glosses and their Latin lemmata have normally been printed. Such an approach prevents one not only from studying the glossator's choices and the reasons behind them, but also from making a correct interpretation of the Old English word if it is divorced from its original context. Furthermore, such an approach does not allow the structure of glossaries to be properly understood: it obscures the relationships between the individual items that make up the glossaries and hinders the identification of their sources. The glossary presented in this article, like many others, contains lemmata with interpretamenta in Old English which have been previously published together with other lemmata glossed in Latin, which still await publication. However, only through comprehensive examination of all the items has it been possible to determine its nature and identify its sources. The short glossary copied out on one of the last folios of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Bodley 163 has hitherto been described as a selection of items drawn from Aldhelm, but on examination it has turned out to consist rather of a series of glossae collectae from various sources which can be traced back to the family of the Leiden Glossary. These glosses provide unique evidence of the Leiden family in that they are contained in a manuscript written, unlike nearly all the others, in England during the Anglo-Saxon period. The glossary in Bodley 163 is composed in all of ninety-two items and was copied out in the same hand on the recto of the first page of a bifolium (250-1) at the end of the manuscript. It is a composite manuscript, consisting of three parts. The first part (1-227), written in Caroline minuscule dating from the beginning of the eleventh century, contains a copy of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum and the poem De abbatibus by Ædiluulf; the second part (228-49), which dates from the beginning of the twelfth century, contains, among other things, a version of the Historia Brittonum; the third part, on fols. 250-1, contains the glossary, datable to about the middle of the eleventh century, together with the beginning of a sermon in Latin for the Feast of St John (250v) and a booklist (251r), both written in a later hand. Both the contents of this list and a note on fol. 250v suggest that the manuscript was written at Peterborough, where, according to T.A.M. Bishop, the scribe who copied out Bede's text was working. His hand has been identified in other manuscripts as well