Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 29

The discovery of OE dry-point glosses by Napier did not succeed in spurring further interest in this type of glosses. Apparently, no-one cared to follow up on Napier’s leads and it was not until 1933 that a further edition of dry-point glosses was published by Meritt (1933). Meritt had been scouring European libraries for OE dry-point material in 1932 and 1933 (cf. Meritt 1945: vi), as he was convinced “that new glosses are to be found both in England and on the Continent” (1933: 305). A first result that he presented from this enterprise was Meritt (1933), an edition of 401 OE dry-point glosses in BEDA, Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum from London, BL Cotton Tiberius C. ii [17/K:198], of which he later (1945: 6–14 [no. 4]) reprinted a slightly enlarged version to include 406 OE dry-point glosses.1 After publishing OHG dry-point glosses from 8 MSS that he had discovered accidentally while looking for OE ones (Meritt 1934), Meritt (1936) published an edition of more than 400 OE dry-point glosses in SEDULIUS, Carmen paschale and Epistola ad Macedonium from Cambridge, CCC 173Cambridge, Corpus Christi CollegeMS 173 [4/K:40], of which he later (1945: 29–38 [no. 28]) reprinted an updated version.

Meritt (1945) eventually published the accumulated harvest of his deciphering efforts in his edition of ca. 2300 OE glosses from 42 MSS, of which 9 MSS contain dry-point material, namely [4/K:40] (Meritt 1945: nos. 28 and 31), [5/K:52] (nos. 27 and 66), [7/K:61] (no. 1), [10/K:95] (nos. 13 and 24), [17/K:198] (no. 4), [19/K:252] (no. 2), [21/K:266] (no. 16), [25/K:293] and [26/K:313] (no. 65).

Meritt devotes a short excursus (1945: viii–ix) to dry-point glosses and briefly outlines some issues surrounding them, especially their visual difficulties. He points out that both a training of the eye and conducive lighting are essential and that skimming natural light is often most advantageous. Meritt especially emphasizes the negative effect of electric light, “which throws a sheen on the page” (Meritt 1945: ix) and hence effectually obliterates the faint visual information provided by the dry-point glosses. Comparing Meritt’s (1945) representation of dry-point glosses to more recent dry-point gloss editions like Page (1981), Nievergelt (2007) or Ernst (2007), one cannot help but notice that there are comparatively few doubtful dry-point readings included in Meritt’s account and that he hardly ever expresses uncertainty about any of his readings. In a few places, Meritt insinuates that he did not include all the dry-point material that he encountered in his forays, and hence one may assume that he intentionally skipped doubtful cases.2 Standing in the OE lexicographical tradition, he never edits L. dry-point glosses, either, which he surely must have encountered and identified as such in order to separate them from OE specimens.

Incidentally, if my identification of London, British Library Royal 15 B. xix [22/K:268] as an OE dry-point gloss MS is correct (see below p. 116), this MS may serve as a reminder that the lack of reports of dry-point glosses for a particular MS must not automatically be taken as evidence that the MS may not yield previously unnoticed material upon further scrutiny on a different day. Meritt (1945: 38–39 [no. 29]) edits 12 OE ink glosses from this MS without mentioning any dry-point material.

Meritt later undertook further journeys to Europe’s libraries to search for OE dry-point glosses. In late 1954 and early 1955, following a lead published in CLA (5: 590), he was able to record 67 OE dry-point glosses in GREGORIUS, Regula pastoralis from Paris, BN lat. 9561 [30/K:369], which he published in Meritt (1957: 65), also listing the position of 21 further scratches in that MS that he could not decipher. It is also Meritt (1957: 67) who reports an OE dry-point gloss in PRUDENTIUS, Cathemerinon from Boulogne-sur-Mer, Bibliothèque municipale 189 [2/K:7]. He later went on to edit the glosses from that MS (Meritt 1959) to replace the previous, partial and partially faulty editions of the glosses in that MS.

As we can gather from Meritt’s account, he spent several months in the summer of 1958 in English and Continental libraries with the specific purpose of “reading and collecting unpublished Old English glosses” (Meritt 1960: 541).” The results of this campaign were published in Meritt (1961), which records some 344 OE glosses from 17 different MS, of which more than 240 glosses in 8 MSS, namely [24/K:12] (Meritt 1961: no. 1), [32/K:A44] (no. 2), [1/K:287*] (no. 3), [15/K:131] (no. 4), [8/K:7*] (no. 5), [11/K:24] (no. 6), [13/K:121*] (no. 14) and [18/K:210] (no. 17), are in dry-point.

Apart from his many gloss editions, Meritt contributed to OE lexicology in major ways by revising and supplementing Clark Hall’s (1960) A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, including a fair number of dry-point glosses in the supplemental appendix.3 In addition to that, Meritt was interested in the process of glossing and especially in lexicographically puzzling glosses that resulted from it. He devotes two books (Meritt 1954 and 1968) to questions surrounding the mysteries of a selection of difficult glosses and he can show convincingly that a careful and integral analysis of the gloss evidence can yield unexpected insights.Bischoff, BernhardHofmann, Josef