The Cleopatra Glossaries are three Latin-Old English glossaries all found in the manuscript Cotton Cleopatra A.iii (once held in the

Cotton library The Cotton or Cottonian library is a collection of manuscripts once owned by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton MP (1571–1631), an antiquarian and bibliophile. It later became the basis of what is now the British Library, which still holds the collection ...

, now held in the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

). The glossaries constitute important evidence for

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th c ...

vocabulary, as well as for learning and scholarship in early medieval England generally. The manuscript was probably written at St Augustine's, Canterbury, and has generally been dated to the mid-tenth century, though recent work suggests the 930s specifically. The glossaries have no connection with Cleopatra herself: they are so named because when kept in the library of Sir

Robert Bruce Cotton Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, 1st Baronet (22 January 1570/71 – 6 May 1631) of Conington Hall in the parish of Conington in Huntingdonshire, England,Kyle, Chris & Sgroi was a Member of Parliament and an antiquarian who founded the Cotton library. ...

, the volume containing them was stored in a bookcase below a

bust Bust commonly refers to: * A woman's breasts * Bust (sculpture), of head and shoulders * An arrest Bust may also refer to: Places * Bust, Bas-Rhin, a city in France *Lashkargah, Afghanistan, known as Bust historically Media * ''Bust'' (magazin ...

of Cleopatra.

Content

The ''First Cleopatra Glossary'' (folios 5r-75v) is alphabeticised by first letter, drawing on a wide range of sources, including a glossary more or less identical to the ''Third Cleopatra Glossary'', material related to the ''

Corpus Glossary The Corpus Glossary is one of many Anglo-Saxon glossaries. Alongside many entries which gloss Latin words with simpler Latin words or explanations, it also includes numerous Old English glosses on Latin words, making it one of the oldest extant text ...

'', and a glossed text of Isidore of Seville's ''Etymologiae''. Some of these sources are among the earliest glosses in English, but the Cleopatra reviser (or his source) often revised them. The glossary only gets as far as P: the compilation or copying seems never to have been completed. The ''Second Cleopatra Glossary'' (folios 76r-91v) contains a shorter glossary, organised by subject. A closely related glossary is found in the first three subject lists of the Brussels Glossary (Brussels, Royal Library, 1928-30). The ''Third Cleopatra Glossary'' (folios 92r-117v) contains glosses to Aldhelm's ''Prosa de virginitate'' and ''Carmen de virginitate'', with the lemmata in the same order as they appear in the text. It was presumably, therefore, based on a copy of Aldhelm's texts which had interlinear glosses. This glossary or one like it was influential, influencing

Byrhtferth Byrhtferth ( ang, Byrhtferð; ) was a priest and monk who lived at Ramsey Abbey in Huntingdonshire (now part of Cambridgeshire) in England. He had a deep impact on the intellectual life of later Anglo-Saxon England and wrote many computistic, h ...

of Ramsey and at least one Anglo-Saxon medical text. Kittlick's linguistic investigation showed that some, at least, of the glosses in the ''Third Cleopatra Glossary'' are in the Anglian dialect of Old English, with later overlays from West Saxon and Kentish (probably in that order). The glossary—though not necessarily all its entries—must have originated in the eighth century. About two thirds of the material in the ''Cleopatra Glossaries'' also occurs in the later '' Harley Glossary''.Phillip Pulsiano, ‘Prayers, Glosses and Glossaries’, in ''A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature'', ed. by Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford, 2001), p. 218

External links

Cotton MS Cleopatra A III at the British Library

References

{{Old English Glossaries Old English literature Glossaries