The ''Harley Glossary'' is an

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons were a cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo-Saxons happened wit ...

glossary A glossary (from grc, γλῶσσα, ''glossa''; language, speech, wording) also known as a vocabulary or clavis, is an alphabetical list of terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms. Traditionally, a glo ...

, mostly providing glosses on

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

words. It mainly survives in the fragmentary British Library, MS Harley 3376 (which preserves the first six alphabetical sections, from "A" to "F"), but two fragments of letter "I" section are also found in Lawrence, University of Kansas, Kenneth Spenser Research Library, Pryce P2 A: 1, and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Lat. Misc. a. 3., fol. 49. The manuscript was produced in western England in the eleventh century, and has been argued to have been produced at

Worcester Cathedral Worcester Cathedral is an Anglican cathedral in Worcester, in Worcestershire, England, situated on a bank overlooking the River Severn. It is the seat of the Bishop of Worcester. Its official name is the Cathedral Church of Christ and the Ble ...

. About two-thirds of the glosses are themselves in Latin, while about a third are in

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 ...

. In the assessment of Jessica Cooke, 'it appears that the compiler wished to emphasise the Latin element of his work as opposed to the vernacular, and wrote the Latin words in large letters on the ruled lines of the pages, while according the English a lower status in smaller writing between the lines. In addition, he reversed the usual trend by re-translating some Old English glosses from his exemplars back into Latin'. Cooke found that about half the entries in the glossary derive from earlier Anglo-Saxon glossaries, with the closest parallels being afforded by 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 ...

of c. 800 and the

Cleopatra Glossaries The Cleopatra Glossaries are three Latin-Old English glossaries all found in the manuscript Cotton Cleopatra A.iii (once held in the Cotton library, now held in the British Library). The glossaries constitute important evidence for Old English ...

of the tenth century: about two-thirds of the material in the latter appears in the 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.

Editions

The principal edition is Jessica Cooke, 'The Harley Manuscript 3376: A Study in Anglo-Saxon Glossography' (Unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge, 1994). An earlier edition is ''The Harley Latin-Old English Glossary Edited from British Museum MS Harley 3376'', ed. by Robert T. Oliphant, Janua Linguarum, Series Practica 20 (The Hague: Mouton, 1966). The two fragments from original letter "I" section, now at Kansas University Library and Bodleian Library, have been published and commented in Luisa Mucciante & Edoardo Scarpanti, ''La sezione del glossario Harley 3376 contenuta nei fogli di Oxford e Lawrence'' (Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso, 2012, ISBN 9788862743396).

References

{{Old English Glossaries Old English literature Glossaries