The Abstrvsa Glossary and the Liber Glossarvm

Abstract

The wholesome severity of publishers' regulations restricted the small Teubner edition of Festus almost to the actual text of the archetype MSS. of Festus and his epitomator Paulus. The flimsy material to be picked up from mediaeval glossaries was excluded from this small and solid structure and reserved for the ampler space and freer air of a second volume, a volume which should attempt a reconstruction of Festus from Paulus' excerpts, like an antiquarian's reconstruction of the Forum from the ruins that now remain. In Goetz' Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum we have apographs of the chief MS. of each important glossary, and in his Thesaurus Glossarum Emendatarum we have all the glosses edited and arranged in dictionary form; but much spade-work has to be done before these glosses can be used by an editor of Festus. Some has been done already by a pupil of Goetz in a Jena dissertation (A. Dammann de Festo pseudo-Philoxeni auctore, 1894), who shows the so-called Philoxenus Glossary to be compiled in part from Festus, and collects and emends its Festus glosses. Yet even this piece of work is not complete. For our (we may say) unique MS. of Philox., a mere ninth-century MS. (of Laon ?), is an imperfec record of that large bilingual collection which has left so many traces of itself in the glossaries of the British Isles and of those parts of the Continent which received English or Irish culture. The Ab Absens Glossary, for example, printed by Goetz (C.G.L. IV. pp. 404–427) from a North Frankish MS. of Charlemagne's time, has (in the A-section) a number of Festus glosses from this collection which are not recorded in our MS. of Philox. and are accordingly ignored by Dammann.