Thesaurus Glossariorum

Critical cumulation

The Material

Franck Cinato
HTL (CNRS, UMR 7597) / Université de Paris:
franck.cinato@cnrs.fr
Created: April 2020

© F. Cinato / CNRS
Latest update: May 2020

Preamble

The edition of the CA section of the glossaries presented here (Abavus, Abrogans, Abstrusa, Ambrosia and the fragment of Bellus) constitutes a part of the material discussed in a forthcoming paper entitled "Critical accumulation? How Glossaries were constituted in the early Middle Ages (6th-8thC)" that will be published in a book:

Crafting Knowledge in the early medieval book:
Practices of collecting and concealing
,
edited by Sinead O’Sullivan and Ciaran Arthur.

It was originaly planned to be read in a conference (unfortunately cancelled) organised at Queen’s University, Belfast, June 2020.

Numerous glossaries circulated during the Middle Ages, so that almost every generation of masters seems to have felt the need to endow their institution with new lexicographic tools. Although some glossaries have enjoyed a very long life (in circulation terms, that is to say, they could be copied almost identically, several centuries after their composition), most of them were replaced by new ones, a priori more complete or better adapted to the needs of their time.
How did the masters proceed? Was the renewal of a glossary only guided by pragmatic questions related to the attrition of reference books? With regard to the "logic of cumulation" that seems to prevail was it animated by some kind of critical thinking? Here are some of the questions that this paper will discuss thanks to the testimonies of three glossaries, mainly Abstrusa, the Liber glossarum and Ambrosia (Goetz's fragmenta monacensia).