The Antwerp-London Glossaries
The Latin and Latin-Old English Vocabularies from Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus 16.2 - London, British Library Add. 32246
Description
The Antwerp-London Glossaries are eleventh-century descendents of the earliest school text in the English language. In their earliest form they played a central role at the seventh-century school of Canterbury; they contributed material to the fundamental texts, dated to the 600s, known as the Leiden Glossary and the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary. A varied collection with five distinguishable parts, the glossaries have at their heart a late Latin encyclopedia, the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. The longest glossary lists thousands of Isidorian headwords and gives definitions in Old English. The glossaries are an important witness to the composing of the first encyclopedic work in our language. In shaping basic school texts, this encyclopedia became a crucial medium for translating Classical learning to an Insular environment. It put its stamp as well on the production of original works by the first generation of English writers, including Aldhelm, a Canterbury alumnus. The Antwerp-London Glossaries are perhaps the last long Old English text never to have been properly edited. This edition is accompanied by textual apparatuses and complete English and Latin indexes.
Reviews
All glossaries contain hidden treasures: renderings of often obscure words and forms sometimes by forms and words still more obscure, but all offering echoes of ancient lore. In David Porter's important new edition of the Antwerp-London glossaries, the first to modern standards, we find a collection of texts that originated in the seventh-century school at Canterbury that Bede extolled as the envy of all others, that influenced the work of Aldhelm, who has been rightly described as 'the first English man of letters,' and that continued to be used and augmented into the eleventh century, when they were finally set down in the form we find here. In effect, the Antwerp-London glossaries shed considerable light on English learning throughout what is often erroneously seen as a dark period of education. Not so, as Porter's brilliant and illuminating new edition so clearly reveals. - Andy Orchard, University of Toronto