Frühmittelalterliche Glossen. Ein Beitrag zur Funktionalität und Kontextualität mittelalterlicher Schriftlichkeit by Markus Schiegg (review)

The title does not make it clear that the subject matter of this book is Old High German glosses, and it is said only in the introduction that we have a dissertation before us. Most German dissertations differ radically from those written by their French and Scandinavian colleagues: their authors address only the narrow specialists versed in the chosen subject and hardly imagine that their production can attract anyone outside that circle of experts. The result makes for very slow reading and limits the work to the proverbial chosen few. Also, every page has multiple footnotes in small print, which sometimes occupy half of the space, another factor that erects a wall between the author and the prospective reader. However, German dissertations do share one feature with their counterparts elsewhere: they strive hard to show the authors’ full grasp of “theory.”

No one will question Schiegg’s erudition, and hardly any of his conclusions are revolutionary (though he often strives to show that his approach is innovative and differs radically from that of his predecessors), but I wonder how many people, except of course the reviewers, even among those seriously interested in Old High German, will have enough time and patience to read the book from cover to cover. In my opinion, Schiegg could have dispensed with discussion of what he calls the teleological approach to the glosses, references to the linguists’ view of teleology and, as regards glosses, bunches of distinctive features (perhaps this conceptual apparatus can be left to phonologists), mentions of Karl Bühler, and several other things of the same type. The bibliography occupies 46 pages and contains nearly 600 titles. Does a book on Old High German glosses need such an enormous apparatus? The author’s favorite word is model: everything is analyzed according to a certain model. We are constantly reminded that Frühmittelalterliche Glossen is a contribution to general linguistics (which it really isn’t and isn’t supposed to be). Simpler language might have made this work more accessible and appealing to medievalists, including general linguists among them.

In the title, Schiegg emphasized the functional and contextual aspects of the glosses as the main objects of his investigation. In point of fact, he produced a fully informed and detailed handbook of gloss research. The text is divided into six chapters: 1) the problem, 2) the context of the glosses, 3) glosses as text, 4) the uses of glosses, 5) classification of glosses, 6) the context of glosses, and 7) a minute analysis of Archiv des Bistums Augsburg, Hs. 6. The most important chapters are the last three, and the most attractive feature of the whole is an approach to the Old High German glosses as texts sui generis, rather than random words used to translate certain lexemes from Latin into Old High German or from Old High German into Latin. Perhaps to invite a larger group of philologists, the book should have been named Old High German Glosses as a Genre.

Schiegg’s attack on “teleology” consists of the unobjectionable plea to analyze every gloss and every type of glosses individually, that is, in their historical context. The ideas brought forward in Chapters 3 and 4 are also non-controversial. Schiegg insists that glosses have a communicative function and should be analyzed from the point of view of their form, function, and the context in which they occur. Attention, we are reminded, should be paid to their purpose, acceptability, informational value, narrow context, and relation to one another (the latter feature is called, in accordance with the usage of literary theory, intertextuality). Once again, the “theory” is the least memorable part of the discussion. Those seriously involved in the theme of this book may begin reading it at pp. 72–74, where the author discusses secret glosses, the use of numes and runes, the appearance of Greek insertions...