A Late Eighth-Century Latin–Anglo-Saxon Glossary Preserved in the Library of the Leiden University

A Late Eighth-Century Latin–Anglo-Saxon Glossary Preserved in the Library of the Leiden University Synopsis

Prior to his 1890 publication of the Corpus Christi Latin–Old English MS, also reissued in this series, Jan Hendrik Hessels (1836–1926) had begun transcribing this equally important text, of which his edition was published in 1906. (He explains the delay by referring to 'work of another nature': his monumental edition of the archive of the Dutch Church in London (1887–1897), also now available in the Cambridge Library Collection.) Hessels again provides a thorough introduction, including a detailed physical description of the manuscript alongside its history, provenance, and a wealth of other information. The work contains extracts from various texts and treatises, and Hessels' cross-references to other glossaries demonstrate the importance of the Leiden MS for gloss-literature, and will be of use to philologists, scholars of Old English and medieval Latin, and historians of the medieval period.