Dry-point glosses to Aldhelm's De laudibus virginitatis in Beinecke 401

Abstract

Yale University, Beinecke Library, 401 contains twenty-six leaves of a ninth-century English manuscript of Aldhelm's De laudibus virginitatis. The manuscript has 189 Old English glosses in ink which were published by A. S. Napier in 1900. Napier also noted the presence of dry-point glosses in the manuscript, and in 1961 H.D. Meritt published twenty-six of these. I have found a total of 160 dry-point glosses and gloss fragments to 153 lemmata in the manuscript, which, other than Meritt's twenty-six, have not been printed before. Dry-point glosses are often neglected in studies of glossing, no doubt due to the difficulty of reading marks scratched into the parchment without ink; I have therefore prefaced my list of glosses and their lemmata with a discussion of dry-point glossing and what it can reveal concerning education in Anglo-Saxon England.