The Latin and Old English Glosses in the ‘Blickling’ and ‘Regius’ Psalters

Abstract

In his Studien zum Psalterium Romanum in England und zu seinen Glossierungen, Karl Wildhagen writes of the Blickling Psalter (MS Pierpont Morgan Library m.776): ‘Dass es gegen Schluss des 10. oder Anfang des 11. Jahrhunderts im Süden und zwar in der bischöflichen (über Canterbury?) oder königliehen Kanzlei zu Winchester gewesen sein muss, beweisen die zahlreichen in ihm befindlichen jüngeren ae. Glossierungen aus dieser Zeit, die durchaus mit der damals in Winchester befindlichen Regius-Glosse übereinstimmen und z. T. sicher aus ihr kopiert sind.’ Helmut Gneuss reiterates Wildhagen's claim for the direct dependence of Blickling (M) upon Regius (D) in his description of the psalter in Lehnbildungen und Lehnbedeutungen im Altenglischen: ‘Die spätws. Glossen sind vorwiegend und wohl direkt von Ms. D. abhängig.’ Kenneth and Celia Sisam, in their edition of the Salisbury Psalter, significantly qualify the suppositions of Wildhagen and Gneuss on the relationship between the Old English glosses of M and D: ‘Nearly all these later glosses are of type D; those that are not are either commonplace or, like 118.139 tyrging = “zelus” and 129.3 hwa acymϷ = “quis sustinebit,” they are found earlier in the psalms in D. There seems to be no means of defining the exact relation of this derivative to the extant D.’ All three of these statements are unsupported by a systematic and detailed examination of the Old English glosses in M and D to determine whether the later glosses in M derive directly from D or from an indeterminate D-type gloss.

Topography, Dialect, And The Relation Of Old English Psalter-Glosses (I)

“…Sisam's magisterial tone has largely conditioned subsequent work on the subject. The two main lines of study have been of pairwise relations between glosses, thus Pulsiano (1991aPulsiano ( , 1996, and computerized number-crunching (thus on a small scale Bierbaumer, on a large scale Berghaus and Ogura). There has been a reluctance to produce stemmata.…”