Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 7

It was for the mere fact that I had a digital camera that I actually ever got into contact with dry-point glosses. Back in 2006, a colleague of mine – Prof. Dr. Andreas Nievergelt – asked me to accompany him to the Zentralbibliothek Zürich to take some pictures of a MS that contained what he called Griffelglossen. He was making the final changes to his dissertation on the OHG dry-point glosses in a Bavarian MS, which was just about to be published (i.e. Nievergelt 2007), and he wanted to embellish it further with some additional crisp pictures of several OHG dry-point glosses from two MSS of the nearby Zentralbibliothek. My ignorance of dry-point glosses back then was nearly complete. I had heard him and Prof. Dr. Elvira Glaser – for whom I worked as a student assistant at the time – talk about the subject and I had written a term paper in my minor subject German on some OHG ink glosses from St. Gallen. However, I was not even sure whether dry-point glossing was an exclusively Continental practice or whether the phenomenon was known from Anglo-Saxon MSS, too. Needless to say, when we finally stood around the first MS and Andreas pointed the glosses out to me I was fascinated: In a seemingly empty spot of a 9^th-c. MS of ALDHELM’s Carmen de virginitateAldhelmCarmen de virginitate, OHG letters started to appear as soon as the electric torch in his hand hit the MS surface at the right angle.Zürich, ZentralbibliothekMs. C 59Zürich, ZentralbibliothekMs. C 411

Having myself a keen interest in Old English philology, I tried to find out whether the phenomenon was known from Anglo-Saxon studies, too, and I soon had to realize that there was hardly any information available on the subject, apart from general references to the existence of such glosses in passing (e.g. Lendinara 1991: 273). The most detailed piece of information I could gather was printed in Mechthild Gretsch’s handbook entry on “Glosses” in the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England:

Glosses may be entered in ink or with a stylus; such ‘scratched’ or ‘dry-point’ glosses are often visible under special lighting conditions only, and their original purpose is difficult to define. Many of these scratched glosses have not yet been published; presumably many more still await detection. (Gretsch 1999b: 209)

What I had hoped to find, however, was a list of MSS or at least an estimate of how many MSS there were known to feature dry-point writing. Having been schooled in OHG glossography, with its impressive gloss collections, multivolume handbooks, exhaustive bibliographies and specialized gloss dictionaries, my expectations were admittedly naïve. That kind of information was simply not available in the Anglo-Saxonist literature.

Probably the only common ground shared by virtually all scholars who have commented on or even have edited OE dry-point glosses is the suspicion that there are many more OE dry-point glosses yet to be found.

In the case of [Cambridge, CCC 285Cambridge, Corpus Christi CollegeMS 285[6/K:54]2] I have, I believe, included all these [=dry-point] glosses, but in the case of the other MSS I gave up the attempt: the deciphering of the scratched glosses was so trying to the eyes, moreover it was so frequently impossible to read them with certainty, that I preferred to confine myself to the properly written glosses. (Napier 1900: xxxiii)

[I]t seems not at all unlikely that other manuscripts with large numbers of legible scratched glosses will yet come to attention. (Meritt 1945: viii)

The fact that they [the dry-point glosses in Cambridge, CCC 57Cambridge, Corpus Christi CollegeMS 57[3/K:34]] were not spotted earlier shows how chancy finding such glosses is and how unlikely it is that our corpus of them is anything like complete. (Page 1979: 30)

In several articles, R.I. Page calls for scholars to pay more attention to dry-point glosses, which, as Beinecke 401New Haven, Yale University Beinecke LibraryMS 401[24/K:12] shows, can still be found in large numbers even in well-known and well-studied manuscripts. I would like to add encouragement for such study. A large body of Old English remains hidden and unexplored which will add to our knowledge of both the Old English lexicon and the workings of the Anglo-Saxon classroom. (Rusche 1994: 203)

More than 100 years after the publication of the first major edition of OE dry-point glosses by A.S. Napier (1900), it seemed to me in order to establish a first comprehensive view of this particular subject by compiling the information that is presently available in the literature. I decided to collect everything I could find on the subject of OE dry-point glosses in order to establish a list of MSS known to contain OE dry-point glosses, which could form a first reference point for the comprehensive study of these glosses.3 I asked Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischer – who had sparked my interest in Old English in the first place back in my undergraduate studies – whether I could write a Ph.D. thesis under his supervision on the topic and he was so kind to support my plans.

Probably the one property of dry-point glosses that has the most wide-reaching consequences for their study is their bad visibility. The extremely low contrast that is provided by the mere deformation of the parchment surface is quite markedly different from the sharp contrast that even the poorest of inks will produce. Consequently, since dry-point glosses are usually anything but conspicuous, even previously published glosses may be overlooked by new generations of philologists. This seems to have happened with the dry-point glosses in Salisbury, Cathedral 38Salisbury, Salisbury Cathedral LibraryMS 38 [31/K:378], for instance. Although edited by Napier (1893), they were overlooked by Gwara (2001a, 2001b), who was apparently not aware of Napier’s additions to Logeman’s (1891) first edition of many of the glosses in that MS. Against the backdrop of Gwara’s continued (1993–2001), thorough and awe-inspiring work on ALDHELM glosses – with a pronounced focus on dry-point glosses – it is beyond doubt that his failure cannot be considered a mere slip, but must be seen as a structural failure in this field of research: The lack of a centralized and regularly updated catalogue of relevant MSS tends to leave the researcher in doubt whether all the relevant secondary sources have been identified. Furthermore, in the absence of a bibliography or a register documenting the state of research, what appears to be a discovery may turn out to have been edited before, as is the case with the dry-point glosses edited by McGowan (1998) from London, BL Royal 5. E. xiLondon, British LibraryRoyal 5. E. xi [19/K:252], which had already been edited by Gwara (1993; 1996b), though with partly differing results. The present compilation is faced with that same difficulty and it is easily possible that important resources have not been identified. Therefore, the resulting Catalogue may serve as a point of reference against which new finds can be compared.

It would be highly desirable for the advancement of the study of OE glossography to have a Catalogue of Old English Gloss Manuscripts at disposal, analogous to Bergmann and Stricker’s Katalog der althochdeutschen und altsächsischen Glossenhandschriften (BStK). The study of OE glossography as a scholarly field, however, seems much further away from such an achievement than it was in 1986, when the leading OE gloss scholars met in Brussels, and a comprehensive approach to the study of OE glosses was felt to be on the verge of the possible.4 The plans discussed there have not materialized, so my Catalogue is also meant as a specialized contribution towards such a co-ordinated Catalogue of Old English Gloss Manuscripts.

In some respects, the Catalogue given here represents an enhanced subset of Vaciago’s (1993) little-known Old English Glosses to Latin Texts: A Bibliographical Handlist, which lists 157 MSS and which, in turn, represents a subset of Ker’s (1957) magisterial Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon. The rather specialist Catalogue presented here, however, has a much narrower depth of field than both Vaciago’s and Ker’s directories: it focuses on a specific way of adding writing to a MS, namely without any colouring matter. Such writing is easily overlooked, both in the MSS and in the secondary literature, so the Catalogue given here aims at giving Old English dry-point glosses additional profile by appreciating them as a materially (albeit not directly) related group in the hope that this approach may raise awareness both with gloss scholars and with palaeographers of the fascinating possibilities that are hidden in this particular kind of written data with its characteristic peculiarities and difficulties.