Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 20

Dry-point writing in medieval MSS is not only known from the Anglo-Saxon sphere. From the European Middle Ages there is also evidence for dry-point glossing in Latin, Old High German, Old Saxon, Old Irish and Old Slavonic.

If we bear in mind that the vast majority of written output in medieval Western Europe was produced in Latin, it comes as something of a surprise that the scholarly literature on OE and especially on OHG glosses by far exceeds that on L. glosses. It is probably just because there are so many extant medieval written documents in Latin left to study that the glosses in them are only rarely studied in their own right. Goossens (1974: 32) remarks: “More than anything else a thorough investigation of the Latin gll. belongs to the urgent requirements but so far that study has not even been started”, and Wieland (1984) pithily calls L. glossing “the stepchild of glossologists”.

Important work has been done in the field of L. glossing, though: Wieland (1983) and Stork (1990) present two detailed studies of the L. glossing in two MSS of ARATOR, PRUDENTIUS and ALDHELM, and McCormick (1992) offers a highly interesting edition of more than 600 dry-point glosses in L. and OHG as well as Tironian notes, dating to the mid-9^th c. from the “Palatine Virgil”Vaticano, Vatican Library MS Pal. lat. 1631 (Vaticano, Vatican Library MS Pal. lat. 1631).

Schipper (1994) edits L. dry-point writing from the so-called “Benedictional of St Æthelwold” (London, British Library Additional 49598London, British LibraryAdditional 49598 [G:301]), produced in AD 971×973 in Winchester, which is considered to be “the most lavishly produced manuscript which has survived from Anglo-Saxon England” (Schipper 1994: 17, quoting Michael Lapidge). Short L. phrases of one to four words are added to 13 top margins of that codex. Schipper (1994: 23) deems it possible that further pages had similar notes, but they may have been cut off during rebinding. These notes clearly do not function as glosses, because they were added before the text was written, as Schipper (ibid.) concludes from an instance of dry-point writing that is right behind the text now. After a detailed analysis of the collation of the codex, Schipper identifies the dry-point notes to be “compilation notes” that is “rough indication of what benedictions were to be inserted and where” (Schipper 1994: 27). Schipper describes the physical appearance of the dry-point notes as falling into two altogether different groups, namely dry-point notes that were entered with a blunt stylus, leaving nothing but an indentation in the parchment, on the one hand, and dry-point notes that were entered with some sort of metallic stylus, whose metallic residue has since “oxidized to a faint dark reddish colour” (Schipper 1994: 21). Schipper includes photographs of eight of these notes that show the difference in their appearance nicely. The oxidized notes contrast quite strongly with the parchment’s surface and hence it comes as something of a surprise that no-one had noticed them before Schipper took an interest in them (cf. Schipper 1994: 18).1 The “Benedictional of St Æthelwold” may be taken as evidence that at least sometimes the stylus was used in Anglo-Saxon England for writing specifically because it did not leave easily visible traces.London, British LibraryCotton Vespasian A. i2

Searching the world-wide web for the expression “scratch glosses”, I came across Prof. Sarah Larratt Keefer’s CV on her institutional website at Trent University (Peterborough, ON), in which she mentioned a paper in preparation on “The Scratch Glosses of Cambridge, Corpus Christi College 146Cambridge, Corpus Christi CollegeMS 146 [K:37]: the Samson Pontifical” (sec. xi^in., cf. Ker 1957: 50–51 [no. 37]). I was intrigued, wondering whether the glosses might be OE, and contacted her via email to inquire about the dry-point glosses. She kindly informed me that they were in Latin and that she would not go ahead with the proposed article on them.3 As far as I can tell, none of these glosses have been published so far.

L. dry-point glosses are sometimes also mentioned and even edited as a by-product by scholars whose main interest is in the vernacular glossing of a specific MS.4 However, especially with early editions it is not clear how the editors dealt with L. dry-point glossing. At least for some MSS, it seems that the L. dry-point glossing was simply ignored as soon as it turned out to be non-OE. So the lack of reports of L. dry-point glossing must not be taken as direct evidence that there are no L. (or further, previously unnoticed vernacular) dry-point glosses in a particular MS.

Recent gloss scholarship has stressed the importance of the inclusion of L. glosses in the study of OE glosses (cf. Page 1992: 85; Gwara 1999: 822). If we want to understand the OE glosses as more than just lexical material, the focus has to be on functional and hence contextual aspects of the glossing, as exemplified by Page (1982) and by Gwara’s numerous publications on the extant MSS of ALDHELM’s Prosa de virginitate. Since the L. glossing often already existed in the MSS at the time when the OE glosses were added, their presence has to be recorded if we want to fathom the intentions behind the vernacular glossing.

I have tried to include that little information on L. glossing that was available to me for the MSS in the Catalogue presented below, however, not being a Latinist and not having autopsied the MSS themselves, I would like to stress that the information given on the L. glossing in the respective MSS is highly selective.