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

PART III
In Parts I and II our investigation has been in a region
if certainty. In Part III it enters the region of probability.
Certainty was provided by the presence of coherent batches of
rhe material used by the glossary-compilers. That used for the
EE Glossary (treated in Part I) was mainly the marginalia of
various texts (Orosius' History, the Bible, Jerome's Church
Worthies, Phocas' Grammar, etc.). But, thanks to this glossary's
primitive arrangement (by A-, not AB-), the 'glossae collectae'
even of so small a text as Phocas' Grammar have retained co-
herence after having been allotted among the various chapters.
In the M-chapter, for example, we found a batch of sixteen
Phocas items which actually kept (in one of our two MSS.) the
exact order in which they had been excerpted from the margins
of a MS. of Phocas. The more advanced alphabetical arrangement
of the Corpus Glossary (by AB-, not A-) subdivided these
Phocas items between three sections, the MA-section, the ME-
section, the MU-section (for it happens that none of them begins
with the lettei-s mi- or mo-), and in the Corpus College MS.
coherence is only partially preserved. While the identity of a
Phocas batch in the two MSS. of the EE Glossary is a clear and
unmistakable thing, the identity of a Phocas cluster in the
Corpus MS. is vague and blurred. When we pass
glossary arranged by A- to the glossary arranged by
from the
AB- we
pass from certainty to probability.
Erf.^ is, like Corpus, arranged by AB-. But luckily its material
is mainly borrowed from two well-known glossaries, Abstrusa and
Abolita, and not culled from the marginalia in authors' texts; so
that in Part II the harvesting of these borrowed items was easy
and free from doubt. Doubt however is inseparable from the
task that awaits us in Part III, the gleaning of the remnants in
all these glossaries, EE, Erf.- and Corpus.
Before we push out into the unknown,
it is well to widen as
far as possible the boundaries of 'terra cognita.' Our lists of
Abstrusa and Abolita items in Erf.'- are capable of expansion,