A tale of two Gormacs. A case-study in reading medieval Irish glossae collectae

Abstract

Glossae collectae, or collections of glosses, are documents which combine and preserve glosses and citations in different styles from different sources in medieval Ireland. Such documents are often fragmentary and give no indication of theme or order, but they form the basis of much larger, scholarly collections such as Sanas Cormaic and O’Davoren’s glossary. Aside from their worth as witnesses to lost texts, the compilatory nature of glossae collectae provides an entry point into the thought processes of the medieval Irish scribe. The following discussion will look at the now lost set of glossae collectae referred to as the Gormac glossae collectae (TCD H 4. 22 [1363] 67a–67b). Gormac-GC contains a variety of genres of source material and is partly arranged into α-order, and so represents a mid-point in the development from in-text gloss to glossary. Using Gormac-GC as a case-study, this article considers how and why sets of glossae collectae were put together and what they can tell us about the transmission of glosses in medieval Ireland.