Through a gloss darkly: Aldhelm's riddles in the British Library MS Royal 12.C.xxiii (review)

Abstract

176 Reviews grasped the significance of the tetralogy for the play but gave a 'deeply anachronistic' (p. 92) reading of the ending, and Anthony Sher's acrobatic Richard. Glen Byam Shaw's and William Gaskill's productions at the R.S.C. show the way forward by their balance and truth to the text. The main faults of the book are some rather long sentences, which may be, paradoxically, the result of a straggle to say it all as briefly as possible, and the absence of notes. Kevin Magarey Department of English University of Adelaide Stork, Nancy P., Through a gloss darkly: Aldhelm's riddles in the British Library MS Royal 12.C.xxiii (Studies and texts, 98), Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1990; paper; pp. vii, 274; 1 plate; R.R.P. CAN$39.50. In a study of Old English glosses in Latin manuscripts published in 1982, R.I. Page issued a call for a way of publishing gloss material that would go beyond the customary lists of transcribed lemmata and glosses. Such transcripts 'cannot give even the lexicographer all he needs, whereas the student who is interested, not just in Latin-Old English equivalents, but in the nature of glossing, the reasons it took the form it did, and the audience the glosses appealedto,will find many of the existing editions of limited use. There is no substitute for the manuscript, but there may be better ways of publishing the gloss material, of defining it more precisely, and it is time these were explored'. Page's challenge is admirably met in this new edition of Aldhelm's 100 Latin Enigmata and then associated glosses in a single manuscript: London, British Library, Royal 12.C.xxiii, fols. 79v-103v. Of Canterbury provenance and early eleventhcentury date, Royal 12.C.xxiii was written as a glossed manuscript, with interlinear Latin glosses designed to be transmitted along with the text. Generous margins were left for more extensive commentary glosses. The text hand, a finely written Caroline script, is responsible for all the Latin glosses and for 32 of the 77 O E glosses. A single second hand has contributed the remaining vernacular glosses. The O E glosses evidently had a lesser status and were added in an ad hoc fashion, having a much looser association than the Latin scholia with Aldhelm's text. The introduction covers a wide range of topics in a concise and practical form and in a lucid, easy style that makes the material accessible to the nonspecialist reader. After a full description of the manuscript and its contents, Stork discusses the often complex relationships between the extant manuscripts and their sets of glosses. Then follows a brief but systematic explication of all the types of gloss represented in the manuscript: metrical, grammatical, Reviews 177 syntactical, textual, lexical and the commentary glosses that draw so heavily on Isidore's Etymologiae. Her conclusion addresses such broader matters as the relation between text and gloss, the peculiarities of English manuscripts and the audience of theriddles.The appendices are especially useful. T w o indices of the Latin-Latin lexical glosses are provided, listed under both lemma and gloss, and an alphabetical list of the O E glosses in Appendix C is complemented by an analysis of the same material ananged in order of appearance in the manuscript on pp. 52-4. A n index to the commentary glosses is followed by an index of sources, a comprehensive bibliography and a general index. This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive edition of Aldhelm's text with full apparatus and notes. Rather the focus isfirmlyon the gloss material and its relation to the text in a single manuscript. Thus her edition presents an innovative reconstruction of each manuscript page with both interlinear and marginal glosses carefully located and clearly and accurately set out. The measure of her success with the layout can be gauged by comparison with the frontispiece plate, which reproduces folio 83r of the manuscript. Stork's edition allows us to read an important school text in the pedagogic context in which it was studied in later Anglo-Saxon England. Paul Sonell Department of English Otago...