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

36 THE CORPUS, EPINAL, ERFURT AND LEYDEN GLOSSARIES ',
appear in the alphabetical glossaries either mutilated, or with
irrelevant additions, or both together. The following reconstruc-
tion will shew what has happened :
p „„ fCalcidon ut ignis lucens. Smaragdus uiridem colorem habet S 378
t hoc est prasinum. Sar donix habet colorem sanguinis, S 82
Q .„„ f qui est onichinus. Crisolitus auri colorem et stellas C 8S6
I luculentas habet. Byrillus tantum ut aqua resplendet B 97
rr 01A ("Topazion ut aurummicat. Cyprassus uiridem habet colorem, ^
(^ ut est porrus, et stellas aureas habet. J
These lines, read straight across, coincide, except for slight differ-
ences of spelling, with what we find in the Leiden Glossary. Read
in two columns, they yield the nonsensical explanations that occur
in the three alphabetical glossaries. The first syllable of Say^donix
was corrupted into Ser ;
the scribe of the Erfurt MS. (doubtless
following his predecessor) wrote the letter jj underneath, for what
reason I am unable to guess. Hence in Epinal and Corpus we
have the unmeaning entry '
Sper, qui est onichinus, luculentas
habet.' The compiler of the alphabetical glossary, without cor-
recting this blunder, added the correct but incomplete reading
'
Sardonix habet colorem sanguinis,' and also (from the margin,
as I have suggested above) the entry Leiden No. 12, 'Sardius,
colorem purum sanguinis.' The list is taken from Apoc. xxii., and
follows the Bible order ; but it is odd that the first two items,
iaspis and sapphiriis, were omitted in the copy used by the alpha-
betical compiler, though preserved in Leiden, and the two last,
hyacinthus and amethystus, are missing in all four glossaries."
all the
With the exception of the Hermeneumata material,
material hitherto treated has been marginalia. Were such items
taken by the compiler directly from the margins of MSS. ? We
have already found an indication in the case of the Bible items
in Leid., that these were taken rather from '
glossae collectae/
And we may say the same of other sections in Leid. where the
author's name is not mentioned, e.g. the Phocas sections (really
one large section rather than two) with the title VERBA DE
MULTis, the Gildas sections with the titles brevis exsolutio
and VERBA. Presumably the compiler had found these '
collectae '
glossae
of Phocas and Gildas on blank pages in some alien MS.
and did not know their source. But the question is hardly worth