5 - The Aldhelm glosses

Summary

In the course of an analysis of words or word families shared by the Psalter and the Rule, remarkable parallels in usage have come to light between those texts and the Old English glosses to Aldhelm's prose De uirginitate as they are transmitted in Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, 1650. It is necessary therefore to examine the genesis and the textual affiliations of the Brussels corpus of Aldhelm glosses and to see what can be ascertained concerning the nature of the glosses themselves.

THE GLOSSES IN BRUSSELS 1650

The main text of that manuscript was written at the beginning of the eleventh century. Several thousands of Old English glosses (alongside a substantial number of Latin ones) were entered between the lines and in the margins by several scribes during the first half of the eleventh century, perhaps at Abingdon. Almost all these glosses of the Brussels manuscript are also found in another manuscript of Aldhelm's prose De uirginitate, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 146 (s. x^ex), into which they were copied from Brussels 1650 around the middle of the eleventh century, again perhaps at Abingdon. The number of entries in Goossens's edition of the Brussels glosses is 5380, that in Napier's edition of the Digby glosses is 5504, but actually the number of glosses is higher in Brussels 1650, since in both editions multiple glossing of a single Latin lemma is not counted separately, and since such multiple glossing occurs more frequently in Brussels 1650.