Читать книгу A Catalogue of Manuscripts Known to Contain Old English Dry-Point Glosses - Dieter Studer-Joho - Страница 8

Many extant medieval MSS do not only feature a main text (or several main texts in sequence), but also additional written material that can range from a couple of dots in the margins to a complete poem added on a previously empty part of a page.glossesterminology In the traditional terminology of OE glossography, only a particular sub-group of additions is referred to as “glosses”, namely words or short phrases that directly translate or comment on a particular phrase of the (commonly L.) base text. The present study takes the traditional approach and restricts the use of the term “glosses” to additions that are themselves made up of linguistic material, thereby excluding prosodic marks, construe marks and doodles. These other additions are worthy of study, and codicologists, palaeographers and art historians ought to look out for them, but the present study does not deal with them.1 This approach is in line with the terminology of the traditional study of OE glossography (e.g. Napier 1900, Ker 1957, Meritt 1968, Page 1973, Gwara 2001) and it is in line with the usage of the term Glossen in German scholarly usage (BStK: 101–109; Henkel 2007: 727), summarized by Gretsch (1999b: 209) as “additions [to L. texts] of translations, synonyms or explanations (usually consisting of no more than a single word)”.

This traditional notion is somewhat at odds with the much more liberal approach to Anglo-Saxon glossing taken by Wieland’s (1983) influential study on the L. glossing in Cambridge, University Library Gg. 5. 35Cambridge, University LibraryGg. 5. 35 [K:16]. Wieland proposes a much broader definition of “glosses” that also includes non-linguistic additions, such as symbols and “anything on a page which is not text proper, but which is intended to comment on the text” (Wieland 1983: 7), explicitly including illustrations and drawings, too. Wieland’s more generous interpretation of the traditional notion of “glosses” to some extent reflects the needs of L. gloss scholars to subsume the many complex layers of additions that we encounter in many medieval MSS beside the L. main text under a convenient umbrella term. Wieland’s broad interpretation of the term “glosses” also seems to have been directly inspired by Robinson’s (1973) term “syntactical glosses”,glossessyntactical which Robinson applies to what I think would be more appropriately termed construe marks (cf. Wieland 1983: 2). Construe marks are symbols or letters that are added to words of L. texts to indicate a particular word order that is easier to parse by the reader. The symbols and letters do not represent linguistic material themselves, as their only function is the indexation of a particular word order, which in turn is linguistic in nature, of course. Wieland’s broad definition of “glosses” has gained currency in Anglo-Saxonist studies (cf. for instance Stork 1990) and at ISAS 2013 in Dublin, several non-linguist Anglo-Saxonist colleagues expressed their surprise that I did not include dry-point doodles in my Catalogue.

I do not think, however, that this re-interpretation of the well-established term “glosses” is helpful from the point of view of glossography and I can only agree with Korhammer (1980: 22), who rejects the use of the term “glosses” in connection with construe marks.construe marks By broadening the definition of the term “gloss” to include non-linguistic additions, we lose an effective means of referring to the different types of additions in medieval MSS, such as marks (i.e. syntactic marks, compilation marks, individual marks of unclear functional status etc.), doodles, names, pen trials, scholia, glosses etc. There is no apparent need to re-interpret the term “glosses” to include all of them, as they are functionally and formally so different that the only property that they share is the fact that they were added later. Hence, “additions” is a more appropriate umbrella term if we want to refer to them all at once.

Among the additions that are themselves made up of linguistic material, glosses are functionally distinguished by representing an explanatory comment on the L. base text. Names, pen trials and compilation marks are not considered in the Catalogue given below: Names may have been meant as owner’s marks or as mere commemorative inscriptions featuring the writer’s or somebody else’s name; “pen trials” (or L. probationes pennae) is a somewhat misleading umbrella term for additional entries that cannot directly be connected to the base text; and compilation marks were added by the scribes during the preparation of the MS. They do all constitute important and interesting evidence for a MS’s history and may provide highly relevant data for onomastic, literary, historical, palaeographical or codicological studies, but their contributions to medieval MSS typically fulfil an arguably different role than glosses.