Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson C.887: An Unpublished Seventeenth-Century Anglo-Saxon Glossary by Nathaniel Spinckes

Abstract

Between 1698 and ca. 1715 Nathaniel Spinckes created an Anglo-Saxon glossary, now Oxford, Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson C.887. This article describes the manuscript, identifies Spinckes’s sources, traces the compilation process and speculates on its purpose, and positions it within the larger context of contemporary antiquarian projects. Spinckes, who enjoyed a long friendship and working relationship with George Hickes and Edward Thwaites, is known for his role as a bishop in the nonjuring Church of England, but not for his part in the compilation and publication of Hickes’s Linguarum veterum septentrionalium Thesaurus Grammatico-criticus et Archaeologicus (1698–1705). His unpublished manuscript reflects a careful reader of some of the earliest published editions of Anglo-Saxon texts. It, together with surviving correspondence, attests to Spinckes’s place in the late-seventeenth and early eighteenth-century antiquarian project to recover Old English.