Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 18

Wallis (2013a, 2013b) presents an interesting case of dry-point annotations in a copy of the OE translation of BEDA’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People preserved in Oxford, Corpus Christi College 279B, Part IIOxford, Corpus Christi CollegeMS 279B, Part II [K:354] (O). This early 11^th-c. copy of the “Old English Bede” was revised by a corrector – presumably of sec. xi – who added short “interventions” to the OE text,dry-pointemendations usually consisting merely of a few letters added in dry-point, of which Wallis records “at least eighty-nine in Book 3” (2013b: 161). Wallis makes a careful attempt at classifying the different types of relationship between the dry-point annotations and the original text.

The largest group of dry-point annotations is concerned with a number of grammatical emendations to the text, such as pronouns in the accusative case following the preposition OE mid. The corrector – working in dry-point – adds the dative ending of the demonstrative pronouns above the forms, only replacing the letters that have to be changed to arrive at the dative form. Wallis (2013b: 173) quotes the example OE mid þa gyfe ‘with the gift’ (f. 26^v), above whose demonstrative pronoun the corrector added the letters ære in dry-point in order to turn the acc. form of the OE pronoun from þa (f. acc. sg.) into þære (f. dat. sg.).

In a second, smaller group of annotations, lexical substitutions are made in dry-point. Thus, for instance, the reading hiwan ‘retainers’ in the relative clause þe se cyning ne cuðe ne his hiwan ‘which neither the king nor his retainers knew’ is emended to the contextually quasi-synonymous hired ‘household’ by means of a drypoint superscript red on f. 42^v. Wallis (2013b: 181) surmises that “hiwan was losing popularity to hired in the course of the eleventh century”.

In a third group Wallis assorts textual annotations, in which Anglian spellings are modified to comply with West Saxon spelling conventions. The spelling Pehta ‘Pict’ (with Anglian smoothing) in two instances of Book 3, for instance, triggered the addition of dry-point <o> above the <eh>, transmuting the form into Peohta, displaying breaking. Incidentally, a third appearance of the same word form remains unammended. In other places, readings that are impaired by cramped lettering are confirmed in dry-point (Wallis 2013b: 186), and in two instances past participle forms are prepended by prefixal ge- (188).

Wallis also identifies a number of dry-point emendations which she takes as evidence that variant readings may have been incorporated from other exemplars of the translation of Bede’s History in dry-point. MS O reads ⁊ þær wæs ‘and there was’ and features a superscribed <o> above the Tironian note. This emendation can be made sense of before the backdrop of the readings provided by MSS T and B oðer wæs ‘the other was’.Oxford, Bodleian LibraryTanner 10Cambridge, Corpus Christi CollegeMS 411

These are interesting finds that leave us hungry for more. If dry-point emendations were added to OE MSS in 11^th-c. England, it may well be that other (perhaps even well-known) MSS of OE texts feature similar annotations that have so far gone unnoticed due to their difficult visual nature. However, I shall not include these emendations as dry-point glosses proper in the present Catalogue. They can certainly be called “glosses” in Wieland’s (1983) sense, but in the traditional terminology of OE glossography they do not qualify as glosses.2 Their “comment” on the text, if you like, is of an altogether different kind. Yet, such annotations are closely related to dry-point glosses and it is to be hoped that similar observations will soon be collected from other MSS to put this usage of the stylus into perspective.