The ''Durham Plant-Name Glossary'' (MS Durham, Cathedral Library, Hunter 100) is a glossary translating Latin and Greek plant-names into

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 ...

Middle English Middle English (abbreviated to ME) is a form of the English language that was spoken after the Norman conquest of 1066, until the late 15th century. The English language underwent distinct variations and developments following the Old English ...

. It was copied in Durham in the early twelfth century. Its principal sources were Greek-Latin-Old English plant-name glossary whose lemmata come from

Dioscorides Pedanius Dioscorides ( grc-gre, Πεδάνιος Διοσκουρίδης, ; 40–90 AD), “the father of pharmacognosy”, was a Greek physician, pharmacologist, botanist, and author of '' De materia medica'' (, On Medical Material) —a 5-vo ...

’s ''

De materia medica (Latin name for the Greek work , , both meaning "On Medical Material") is a pharmacopoeia of medicinal plants and the medicines that can be obtained from them. The five-volume work was written between 50 and 70 CE by Pedanius Dioscorides, ...

'', which also contributed lemmata and glosses to the Épinal-Erfurt glossaries, and those entries in the '' Old English Herbarium'' which translate Latin plant-names with vernacular plant-names. A text very like the ''Durham Plant-Name Glossary'' was one major source of the more extensive '' Laud Herbal Glossary''.Rusche, Philip Guthrie. 2008. ‘The sources for plant names in Anglo-Saxon England and the Laud Herbal Glossary’, in ''Health and Healing in the Medieval Garden'', ed. by Peter Dendle and Alan Touwaide, 128–44. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.

References

Old English literature Glossaries 12th-century books Botany books {{botany-book-stub