Isidore's Etymologiae and the Canterbury Aldhelm Scholia

Philip G. Rusche, University of Nevada, Las Vegas

As an encyclopedia of classical and medieval learning, Isidore's Etymologiae was one of the central and most indispensable works in a medieval library. Shortly after Isidore's death in 636 A.D., Braulio, Bishop of Saragosa, edited and divided the text into 20 books containing sections on subjects such as the seven liberal arts, medicine, law, computus, the Bible and the church, language, mankind and animals, the earth and the heavens, rocks and minerals, plants and agriculture, warfare, ships, clothing, and food. The work quickly spread outside of Spain, and it became the standard reference work for vocabulary on any of the subjects listed above. By the middle of the century it was already known in Ireland, and by the end it was known in England, where it was used by both Aldhelm and Bede, among others. No doubt one of the primary attractions this text had for the Irish and Anglo-Saxons as non-Romance speakers was that it presented its information primarily in linguistic form by discussing the meanings of Latin words and their component parts. Its concentration on the definitions of Latin words made it an important source of information on Latin lexicography, and it was thus used frequently by creators of glossaries, especially those laid out by subject matter, such as the Second Cleopatra Glossary, the Brussels Glossary, and the Antwerp-London Glossary. The Etymologiae was also one of the major sources for the scholars and teachers who added glosses and scholia in the margins of literary texts—not only those by authors such as Aldhelm, who used the Etymologiae himself as a source for lexical variation characteristic of his literary style, but also texts like the Bible or by Classical authors who often wrote of material objects or places unfamiliar to an Anglo-Saxon audience. These glosses and scholia were then copied together with the text into new manuscripts or excerpted into glossaries, and in the process they were frequently edited or altered. An examination of these glosses as they appear in different manuscripts produced in different periods should reveal not only how influential the Etymologiae was in the exposition of such texts, but also how the use of the text changed according to differing tastes in Anglo- Saxon literary criticism. As a brief introduction to such a study, I look at some of the ways in which these Isidorian glosses appear in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts from Canterbury, and some of the reasons for the different forms the glosses take. After a brief introduction on some of these differences as they appear in glosses on Aldhelm's Enigmata and the Gospels, I focus on the glosses in the tenth- and eleventh-century manuscripts of Aldhelm's De virginitate and the Third Cleopatra Glossary. Not only do the Latin glosses in these manuscripts show a heavy debt to Isidore, but even the Old English ones can frequently be shown to originate not as translations of the text but, rather, as translations of original Latin glosses taken from the Etymologiae.