the corpus, épinal, erfurt and leyden glossaries, viii - World eBook ...

100 THE COEPUS, EPINAL, ERFURT AND LEYDEN GLOSSARIES ^
as the 'glossae verborum et nominum' (p. 46) were peculiar to
Erf.^. Can we then date the compilation of Corpus as later than
the publication of Aldhelm's prose treatise on Virginity? Not
convincingly. For these Aldhelm items may have been alien
from the original form of Corpus. They may have been insertions
in the Corpus College MS. or its exemplar, an exemplar perhaps
hardly older than the transcript itself.
To pass to a thing of more importance. Now that the-
presence of Aldhelm glosses in the Corpus College
MS. has
been established, there is great danger that heedless persons
will forget the limitation "in items peculiar to Corpus." For
and EE a
undoubtedly they will find on every page of Corpus
number of words used by Aldhelm, and they will find chapters
of Aldhelm in which a large proportion of the glossable words
appears in Corpus and EE. They must always ask themselves:
Is not Aldhelm the debtor rather than the creditor?
Any teacher of Latin, when he examines the Latin Prose
Versions of a class, can detect at once the use of an English-
Latin Dictionary by a pupil. Anyone who has become familiar
with the stock-material of Latin Glossaries (say, by studying a
sufficient part of C. G. L. vol. iv) can see at once that Aldhelm's
Latin is 'glossary Latin' and not purely 'authors' Latin.' Aldhelm
got the stranger part of his vocabulary from glossaries rather
than from a wide reading of Latin authors. He had so steeped
his mind in such glossary-material as was available in English
monasteries that, when he took his pen in hand, a motley host
of glossary- words crowded on his recollection; 'ghost-words' like
arcister, cerciliis (1), ihoracicla{l), musty relics of antiquity like
meditulliuTn, hirquitallus, mactus, rare vocables like allux, antiae,
vola, flustra. Sometimes he adds the glossary's interpretation;
e.g. (ch. ix) lympha quam anthlia, hoc est rota hauritoria, exant-
lamus; (ch. xxxviii) palathas, id est caricarum massas; (ch. xxix)
chiliarcho, id est trihuno militum. His ansatae (in the last chapter
of the Laud. Virg.) may come from Nonius (556, 19 Ansatae:
iaculamenta cum ansis). It is a wrong interpretation of the
facts to call these 'Corpus borrowings from Aldhelm.' They are
Aldhelm's borrowings from the predecessors (or contemporary
rivals) of Corpus.