Liber Glossarum Research Articles

Some Remarks about the Latin Physiologus Extracts Transmitted in the Liber Glossarum

Abstract This paper is aimed at describing the presence of the Latin Physiologus in the Liber Glossarum. After a brief introduction to the Latin Physiologus and a census of the Liber Glossarum items drawn on it, two noteworthy attitudes of the Liber Glossarum are outlined: distrust in the Physiologus stories, clearly expressed at least for the items up to section FE, and no interest in allegorical and moral comments. Finally, a couple of Liber Glossarum entries from the Latin Physiologus (AS 171 Aspides, PE 217 Pelicanus) are analysed in comparison with the text given directly by the existing versions of the Latin Physiologus: the Liber Glossarum comes out as an important means of transmission of ancient stages of the Latin Physiologus text which would be otherwise lost.

The List of Notae in the Liber Glossarum

In both Antiquity and the early Middle Ages, a special class of marginal symbols, known in Latin as notae, were used to annotate the manuscript text. The shapes of these marginal symbols, their names, and functions were described in technical texts that had the form of lists of signs, the sign treatises. Many early medieval manuscripts contain sign treatises of either ancient or early medieval origin. One such treatise was incorporated into the Liber Glossarum, a large glossographic collection that survives in a number of Carolingian manuscripts. This sign list is, like many other sign treatises, a compilation of older sources. While it is difficult to analyze the other sign treatises, the direct sources of which are lost, we possess the main source of the sign list in the Liber Glossarum, namely the Etymologiae of Isidore of Seville. A comparison of the sign list in the Liber Glossarum with the Etymologiae allows us to analyze the processes used by the compilers of the former rather than just their sources. This comparison shines light also on how other sign treatises preserved in early medieval manuscripts may have come into being. Moreover, the sign list in the Liber Glossarum provides evidence that the oldest core of this glossary came into being on the Iberian peninsula and includes material that had been used by Isidore of Seville for the Etymologiae, as suggested by Anne Grondeux.

A propos de deux livres d’Heiric d’Auxerre : l’Ars Prisciani et le Liber glossarum

The biographical gaps in the life of Heiric Auxerre, a Carolingian intellectual, can be filled by autobiographical notes and abundant glosses in his hand on the pages of books he owned. These offer insights into his reactions to several texts, among others, Augustine, Livy, Martianus Capella and Priscian. This study focuses on two books that were in his possession (Liber Glossarum and Ars Prisciani) whose glosses show how his reflexion developed.

Prime osservazioni sulle glosse Virgili tramandate nel Liber glossarum

Through the analysis of some Liber Glossarum glosses with the label Virgili , it is possible to develop insight into their content and form, namely their relation with the Virgilian exegesis, their vocabulary (sometimes Christian or Late Latin), their level of corruption. The Virgilian lemmas examined are, in order : Adrasti pallentis imago ; Galatea reliquit ; adsuetumque malo Ligurem ; origine ; armiger ; macte (mactate) ; aerea limina (aeratae fores) ; aurea fibula and hibernam ; addas.

Les interprétations des noms hébreux dans le Liber glossarum

Among the 520 AB entries of the Liber glossarum, 17 give interpretations of Hebrew, Syriac and Chaldaic names. They represent a little more than 3% of the total. Their main sources are Eucherius of Lyon, Instructiones II, Isidorus of Sevilla, Etymologies VII and some biblical commentaries of Hieronymus, whose Liber interpretationis nominum Hebraicorum is the most important source of Eucherius and Isidorus. The immediate and ultimate sources of each interpretation are indicated and then the compiler’s method of working is explained. Paradoxically, most of the time, the compiler introduces interpretations of Hebrew names by a simple ‘‘ interpretatur’’, without mentioning the Hebrew language.

Le Liber glossarum (VIIIe siècle). Prolégomènes à une nouvelle édition

European Research Council for the years 2011-2016. It aims to produce a critical edition of the Liber glossarum under the direction of the author. The article provides a state of affairs and the main lines of the research project, such as the study of the working methods of excerptors, their errors, the rewriting phenomena... The methodology for treating sources is illustrated by examples taken from Isidore of Seville and Ambrose.

The Abbo glossary in London, British Library, Cotton Domitian i

The process through which glossaries came into being can sometimes still be seen and studied in surviving manuscripts, and in such cases it provides a valuable index to the way in which Latin texts were studied in medieval schools. This is the case with an unprinted glossary in London, British Library, Cotton Domitian i. The glossary is mainly made up of words taken from bk III of the Bella Parisiacae urbis by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, a work which was widely studied in English schools in the tenth and eleventh centuries, above all because of its unusual vocabulary. We know that Abbo drew the unusual vocabulary in his poem from pre-existing glossaries such as the Liber glossarum and the Scholica graecarum glossarum; but he also took from these works the interlinear glosses which he provided for the difficult words in bk III of his poem, and these in turn are found, with little variation, in all of the manuscripts which preserve the poem. Now under the rubric ‘Incipiunt glossae diversae’ in Cotton Domitian i are collected some two hundred lemmata from bk III of the poem, followed in each case by one or more glosses; on examination these glosses are found to be identical with those which accompany the text in other manuscripts. The glossary in Domitian i thus provides a working model of how a glossary was compiled, and is a further witness to the popularity of Abbo's poem in Anglo-Saxon England.

The Glossarium Salomonis and Its Relationship to the Liber Glossarum

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Glossarium Salomonis and Its Relationship to the Liber GlossarumJ. A. McGeachy, Jr.J. A. McGeachy, Jr. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 13, Number 3Jul., 1938 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/3038948 Views: 6Total views on this site Citations: 2Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1938 The Mediaeval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article: ADAM S. COHEN Making Memories in a Medieval Miscellany, Gesta 48, no.22 (Oct 2015): 135–152.https://doi.org/10.2307/29764904Birgit Meineke Zu einer Edition der sogenannten Glossae Salomonis, (May 2014): 18–37.https://doi.org/10.13109/9783666203343.18

Gleanings from Glossaries and Scholia

My hope (Class. Rev. 34, 105) of an edition of the quotations in the Liber Glossarum has at last been realized in Professor Mountford's excellent Quotations from Classical Authors in Medieval Latin Glossaries (= Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, Vol. XXL), New York and London (Longmans, Green and Co.), 1925.

Geographical Lore in the Liber Glossarvm

In the encyclopaedia portion of the Liber Glossarum the compiler introduced numerous historical and geographical excerpts of varying length. The writers from whose works the geographical extracts are primarily taken are Isidore, Orosius, and Eutropius; but though the compiler has in many cases appended the labels ESIDORI, PAVLI HOROSI, or simply OROSI, and EVTROPI to the entries, this is by no means always the case. A few of the excerpts are of great length; thus, the longest of all, Hispania (HI 233), which is labelled PAVLI HOROSI, SVLINI, OROSI, fills a whole column of the Paris MS. (P.). Other long geographical entries are IT 12 (Italia), GA 52–4 (Gallia Belgica, Gallia Lugdunensis, Gallia), and RO 105–8 (Roma). The length of HI 233, coupled with the fact that the next entry (HI 234) fills half a column of P., and contains Isidore's remarks on Spain (Etym. 14, 4, 28–30), has been used as an argument by those scholars who maintain that the Liber Glossarum is the work of a Spanish compiler. To this the obvious retort would seem to be that the presence of three passages about Gaul might with equal justice be used to support the view that the compilation was made in France. Other evidence of a ‘Spanish hand’ in certain geographical items will be given below, but it is of such a character that it adds nothing to the evidence for the vexed question of provenance.

De Mensium Nominibus

In the huge mediaeval storehouse of miscellaneous fragments, compiled not later than the eighth century and now known by the title Liber Glossarum, there are not a few items dealing with the names of the months in various parts of the ancient world. Some of them (such as Helul in Macchabaeorum libro Augustus, qui apud nos mensis sextus, vocatur) come from the second book of the Instructiones of Eucherius (p. 153, ed. Wotke); some (such as Februarius nuncupatur a Februo, id est Plutone, cui eo mense sacrificabatur) are excerpts from Isidore's Etymologiae (v. 33); while a few (such as Aprilem vero, nullo deorum suorum nomine, sed de re propria, quasi Aperilem nominaverunt eo quod tunc plurimum germinis aperiatur in florem) can be traced to Isidore's De Natura Rerum (cap. 4). Among the remainder, however, which cannot be found in any of the definitely recognisable sources of the Liber Glossarum, there are 116 forming by themselves a distinct group. In these items a curt formula gives us the names by which the months were known in eleven different parts of the world, e. g.:—

A Caper Quotation in the Liber Glossarvm

In Class. Quart. XV. 193 Dr. Mountford discussed a quotation from the Grammarian Caper in the Liber Glossarum (s.v. Lacteus), and referred it to an item culled from Vergil Scholia by the Abstrusa Glossary. Since Keil in his edition of this grammarian (Gram. Lat. VII.) did not know of this glossary evidence to Caper's text, it may be worth mention that another Caper quotation appears in Lib. Gloss., s.v. Kaluus (properly Kalua or Calua). It is taken from the first sentence of p. 100 of Keil's edition, and shows that the words caluaria singulare have dropped out of the three Caper MSS. used by Keil, after plurale est, though they have left a trace in a variant (caluaria for calua) in two of the trio. And it testifies (rightly or wrongly) to the name of the historian who used caluaria ‘a skull.’ Here is the gloss as it stands in the two chief MSS. of the Liber Glossarum:Kaluus:кραѵоѵ uocatur, licet Celio et Varro kaluariam dicant; nam caluariae plurale est, kaluaria singulare.

A New Fragment of Latin Comedy?

In a recent article (C.Q. XV. 192–194) attention was drawn to those quotation items (labelled DE GLS) in the Liber Glossarum which cannot be traced to any one of those authors, such as Isidore and Augustine, whose work formed the basis of the Lib. Gloss.

The Obelisks of Augustus at Rome

Among the monuments erected by Augustus at Rome were two obelisks, about which the elder Pliny gives fairly full information. They had originally been erected in Egypt by two different monarchs, and, when Augustus had them transported to Rome, the one was placed in the Circus Maximus, the other in the Campus Martius. Moreover, the latter was put to practical use by being an essential part of the large solarium erected by the Emperor. Somewhat earlier in the same book Pliny attributes the setting up of the first obelisk to Mespheres at Heliopolis. The king had been warned to do this in a dream. In his chapter on obelisks Isidore also attributes the institution of this form of monument to this king, whom he calls Mesfres. He further gives more precise reasons for the dedication, and then passes on to the obelisk in the middle of the Circus; though his description is somewhat obscure, it is implied that the obelisk was used for a sun-dial. This passage from Isidore is reproduced in the Liber Glossarum, together with a sentence which is not in the MSS. of Isidore, and which occurs between sections 1 and 2 of the chapter in question:– ‘unum quippe fecit pedibus septuaginta quinque, alterum septuaginta sex quos Augustus ab ultima Aegypto deportatos alterum ex his Circo, alterum in Campo Martio posuit.’

Some Quotations in the Liber Glossarvm

In response to a suggestion in the Class. Rev. (XXXIII. 106), the two MSS. of the Liber Glossarum preserved at Tours have recently been examined. Since they had not been seen by Goetz when he published his excerpts, the following short descriptions may be added to the introduction of Vol. V. of the Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum:1. Tours, Bibliothèque de Ville, MS. No. 850; end of the ninth century; foll. 493, of which 1, 491, 492 are mere corners; cmm. 49 by 29. The last item is an Isidore gloss, Zatenen.-gemmam. Gaps due to loss of folia occur between Abiectus and Abdolet; Dextera manus and Dialogus; Faber and Impulitum; Res diuinae and Samsacus. There are no corrections except between folia 197 and 300, where a thirteenth-century hand has checked the MS. by means of another copy of the Lib. Gloss. The items are drawn up in two columns, and the alphabetical arrangement agrees for the most part with that of Vat. Pal. lat. 1773. Marginal indications of the sources of the items are numerous except between Profanum and Remeantes; where two or three neighbouring items come from the same source, the marginal mark is repeated; and towards the end of the MS., where the scribe takes to writing two items in the same line, the indication is also carefully transferred. This is important in view of Goetz' theory that the source of an unlabelled item is that given by the last preceding label.

Notes on the Abstrvsa Glossary and the Liber Glossarvm

The Abstrusa glossary consists to a great extent of glosses extracted apparently from the margins of a Virgil MS., which contained not merely explanations of difficult words but many long scholia taken from ancient commentators such as Donatus and Servius. In its original form it was probably much larger than it appears in C.G.L. IV. The process of curtailment is visible in the MSS. we possess. Moreover, the Liber Glossarum and other glossaries borrowed freely from it, and often show its glosses in a fuller form. It is reasonable to suppose that many glosses of the kind described above, which are found in the Liber Glossarum (with the sign DE GLS., i.e. ‘taken from glossaries’) and sometimes elsewhere, belonged to the Abstrusa glossary, though they do not appear in the edition of it which has survived. (See Lindsay, C.Q. XI. 120 sqq.) Some of the following notes will show how these principles help to clear up difficulties which arise in the investigation of individual items.

Virgil Glosses in the Abolita Glossary

The aim of this article is twofold: first, to prove that Virgil was one source of the Glossary which is printed within square brackets in Goetz;' Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum, Vol. IV. pp. 4–198, and to which Professor Lindsay, in his article on the Abstrusa Glossary and the Liber Glossarum in the Classical Quarterly for July of last year (Vol. XL No. 3), has given the name of Abolita (Abol.); secondly, to show, as the result of assigning batches of glosses to Virgil, that certain corrections must be made in the Thesaurus Glossarum Emendatarum. The corrections there made likewise hold good for the Latin Thesaurus, so far as it goes, which has taken over the errors without question from the Thes. Gloss.