The Antwerp–London Glossaries
The Latin and Latin–Old English Vocabularies from Antwerp, Museum Plantin-Moretus 16.2 – London, British Library Add. 32246.
Volume 2: Introduction, Translation, and Commentary
Publications of the Dictionary of Old English 9. xiv, 610 pp. Cloth. ISBN 978-0-88844-909-2 • $155.00
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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 first volume’s edition of the Antwerp–London Glossaries is accompanied by textual apparatuses and complete English and Latin indexes. This second volume includes introduction, translation, and explanatory notes.
Published for the Dictionary of Old English by the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Author
David W. Porter was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1950. He holds a doctorate from the University of Texas, where he studied literature and language. He taught in Japan and Egypt, at several American universities, and served for twenty-eight years at Southern University, Baton Rouge, two of them as chair of the Department of English. He has published widely on Anglo-Latin and lexicography. He plays five-string banjo in several old-time string bands.
Endorsement
“David W. Porter does the scholarly community a great service with this edition of the Antwerp-London glossaries. ... His first volume presents meticulously the entirety of the glossaries in the manuscript, taking into account the original divisions within the manuscript text. ... Porter makes these lists all the more accessible by adding indices to each of the four divisions, so that all items can be found easily by the modern scholar – whether one takes the Latin term or the Old English one as one’s starting-point. ... Although the glosses one finds in these glossaries are, with some exceptions, based on the translation of individual words rather than sentences or paragraphs, a lot can be learnt from the way the translator finds equivalents between objects and concepts in a Southern European world that communicated in Latin, and his own Anglo-Saxon environment.” — G. Latré, in a review of the first volume, Bulletin Codicologique (2011)
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