Prudentius

This afternoon I'm going through a ninth-century book from Arras checking its condition. It's mostly Prudentius. It has tenth-century English glosses, and more from the eleventh century and later. This sort of manuscript, the unpretentious working manuscript, has its own charm against the more elegant liturgical books. The glosses in an early canonical form of Square minuscule (I'm guessing Phase II, Phase fans), not at all a suitable glossing script, are otherwise quite practical in nature -- subbisido means rapido, for example. Later glosses in a lovely Late English Caroline Minuscule (Style IV, if you will) are more obviously about improving command of the Latin language, not just understanding it, so there are lots of synonyms, like manifestatrix for proditrix. Rhetorical devices like synecdoche are helpfully pointed out in the margin, and there are occasional notes on scansion. This scribe occasionally fell back onto Old English (in eleventh-century vernacular minuscule) -- for example, chirographo is glossed handfæstnunge, meaning "handfastening", and I think we can all agree that that's nice.

There are two excellent things here. Number one is that you can start by knowing a bit about the script, and spot the details in the glosses which show they're from the first half of the tenth century. And because you can see that the main script is Caroline from the north you know that this is a Continental book, and you know that it was brought over in the period when the English were trying to rebuild their learning after the huge disruptions of the ninth century. The glosses are in an Insular script, not Caroline, though this book itself is an example of the models which the English were rejecting when they developed Square minuscule. Then the glosses show the different ways that people were learning at the time. From the evidence of the little details of ductus etc you can move out to huge important things -- as long as you get the first details right.

The second is that I don't have to publish about it, I'm not making a study of the glosses of Prudentius or cultural contacts between England and the Continent in the tenth century, I'm simply checking it for tears and holes, so I can just put a small random note about it on my blog. Yay!