The ''Laud Herbal Glossary'' (MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 587) is a twelfth-century copy of the single biggest compilation of plant-name glosses of its time in England, rooted in

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a Cultural identity, cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced t ...

sources. Its lemmata are mostly Latin, and these are mostly glossed into

Old English Old English ( or , or ), 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 developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-S ...

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 pe ...

. Although the Laud Herbal Glossary drew on many sources, its main sources for vernacular glosses are a list of plant-names in the Greek primer, the '' Hermeneumata Pseudo-Dositheana'' (the best preserved manuscript of which appears to be Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, 1828–30, folios 94–95, which gives the names under the title 'Nomina herbarum Grece et Latine'); the ''

Old English Herbarium 210px, Manuscript Kassel; 9th century, Mandragora Pseudo-Apuleius is the name given in modern scholarship to the author of a 4th-century herbal known as ''Pseudo-Apuleius Herbarius'' or ''Herbarium Apuleii Platonici''. The author of the text appare ...

''; and a text very like the '' Durham Plant-Name 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 Botany books 12th-century books {{botany-book-stub