Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 30

From 1933 onwards the palaeographer Bernhard Bischoff travelled through European libraries investigating MSS that were meant to be included in Elias Avery Lowe’s Codices Latini Antiquiores: A Paleographical Guide to Latin Manuscripts Prior to the Ninth Century (CLA), later published in 12 volumes from 1934–1971 (cf. Bischoff 1998: vii). While carefully autopsying the relevant MSS to compile his palaeographical and codicological descriptions, Bischoff discovered a substantial number of glosses (both in ink and in dry-point) in a number of the MSS that he studied.1 He freely shared his discoveries with OHG philologists, but their plans to follow up on his discoveries were foiled at first by the outbreak of World War II (Stach 1950: 11). Although the majority of Bischoff’s gloss finds were in OHG, Bischoff also discovered a number of OE dry-point glosses, whose details he shared with Josef Hofmann in the mid-1930s (cf. Hofmann 1963: 27–29). Hofmann, a librarian by trade, had set out to investigate the corpus of ancient Würzburg MSS systematically already in the 1930s, but it was only in 1963 that his impressive investigation was published. It includes OE dry-point glosses from 5 MSS in German libraries, all of them quite ancient and directly or indirectly connected to St Boniface’s mission to Germany, namely [1/287*], [12/A41], [13/K:121*], [14/K:98*] and [34/K:400]. Interestingly, all 5 MSS also feature very early OHG dry-point glosses; in fact, one of them – the “Maihingen Gospels” [1/K:287*] – is considered to contain some of the most ancient extant specimens of OHG glossing (cf. below). Incidentally, Hofmann (1963: 29) states that he only examined the MSS in the libraries at Würzburg, Fulda, Harburg (later in Augsburg), Karlsruhe and Wien in person. This means for our purposes that his OE dry-point readings from Kassel [13/121*] and Köln [14/98*] only rely on Bischoff’s notes.

It was probably also Bischoff who detected the OE dry-point glosses in Paris, BN lat. 9561 [30/K:369] and in St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek 1394, Part IX [32/K:A44], as these glosses were mentioned in CLA before they were later edited by Meritt. Much later, when CLA had long been completed, Bischoff & Löfstedt (1992) edited OE dry-point glosses from St. Paul i. L., Stiftsbibliothek 2/1 [33/K:–]. I have not been able to ascertain which part of the actual work on CLA was undertaken by Bischoff, but there is the possibility that Bischoff did not autopsy many of CLA’s MSS in Great Britain. As mentioned above, Bischoff took up work on CLA in 1933, and CLA Volume 2 was published in 1935. There is evidence that Bischoff autopsied at least a few MSS in Oxford2 and in Ely3 before World War II, but it may well be that the majority of the work in the British libraries had already been finished by the time Bischoff was hired.4