The Antwerp-London Glossary and Aelfric's Glossary: A Record of the Earliest English Scholarship

Abstract

SOME ninety years ago W. M. Lindsay corrected scholars who found in the early English glossaries what they believed to be glossae collectae from Aldhelm’s prose De Virginitate (Pdv). Tracing the glosses to other sources, Lindsay demonstrated that the lines of dependence ran in the exact opposite direction, that Aldhelm had borrowed from the glossaries, incorporating glossarial items sometimes in their original order.1 Let me adduce a further example of Aldhelm’s glossarial borrowing. In Chapter 34 of the Pdv, the saintly twins Cosmas and Damianus are able to heal a range of disabilities: scilicet caecis et malagma monoptalmis impertiendo, mutis taciturnitatis ualuam reserando, surdorum auribus armonias rerum restaurando, balbis et blessis rectitudinem loquelae largiendo, claudos et mancos incolomitati pristinae restituendo, inerguminos … .2 The same disabilities occur in a discrete batch from Ælfric’s Glossary, 304–05:3 We may be sure that the batch did not originate in the Pdv since it comes from the very same text that supplied almost 1,000 of the 1,250 or so entries in Ælfric’s Glossary, namely Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae.4 If the source is the expected one, the batch is nonetheless remarkably idiosyncratic, for it comes from the alphabetically arranged Book 10 of Isidore’s encyclopedic work. Whereas the Etymologiae as a whole is ordered by semantic field—for example, trees, stones, tools, ships, etc., the entries of Book 10, uniquely, follow the letters of the alphabet. Thus the Latin headwords above are distantly spaced, a b-word like balbus far separated from an s-word like surdus. Clearly, a careful editor has read Chapter 10 through and grouped widely scattered entries semantically, so gathering together the disabilities we see above. Ælfric’s Glossary is generally dated to the tenth century, but the careful editing and compilation that produced the list of disabilities can have occurred no later than the late seventh century, when the Pdv was issued: the incorporation of the same unusual constellation of vocabulary betrays Aldhelm’s knowledge of the glossarial compilation.