Glossa Ordinaria, Pars 22, In Canticum Canticorum (review)

198 Reviews Dove, Mary, ed., Glossa Ordinaria, Pars 22, In Canticum Canticoru (Corpus Christianorum, Continuatio Mediaevalis 170), Turnholt, Brepols, 1997; cloth; pp. 454; R.R.P. BEF6,750. In the early twelfth century, Anselm of Laon and his associate began the compilation of a major commentary on the Bible, which eventually developed into the standard exegetical source of the later Middle Ages, the Glossa Ordinaria. The importance of this work can hardly be underestimated; it provides an authoritative and definitive guide to the Biblical interpretations and meanings which resonate in the thought and literature of the period. A m o d e r n edition of the Glossa Ordinaria has long been a desideratum. Migne's nineteenth-century version in the Patrologia Latina is of little use, because it omits the entire interlinear part of the commentary. But a critical edition is made difficult by the very popularity of the Glossa. M a n y manuscripts survive, often of a commentary on individual books of the Bible rather than of the whole work, and there is considerable variation in their contents and arrangement. Scholars have had to be content with a facsimile reprint (Turnhout: Brepols, 1992) of the first printed edition, published by Adolph Rusch in Strassburg in 1480/81. Unlike Migne, Rusch included both the interlinear and marginal glosses and produced a reliable text, but he seems to have used a manuscript from the late twelfth or early thirteenth century, and gives no evidence of the variations in the Gloss, nor of its development over time. The appearance of Mary Dove's edition of the Gloss on the Song of Songs is, therefore, a major landmark in the history of this work. As she emphasises, this is not intended to be a full critical edition but is an attempt to reproduce the early text as it was in the firstfiftyyears of its existence, up to ca. 1170. Dove relies on eight Reviews 199 carefully chosen witnesses: thefiveearliest manuscripts, dated before 1150; two Paris manuscripts of the mid-twelfth century; and another Paris manuscript of the third quarter of the century, chosen for its closeness to the text of Rusch's edition. Included among them is a manuscript written in Laon before 1135, but probably after Anselm's death in 1117. Each manuscript is thoroughly and carefully described and analysed, and the reasons for the selection of these eight—from the more than seventy which survive for this section of the Gloss— are fully and convincingly argued. As the base text for this edition, D o v e uses an English manuscript (now Hereford Cathedral Library M S P18) which has been dated ca. 1135-45 and is the fullest and most reliable of the earlier manuscripts. To this text have been added 46 glosses which appear in at least two of the other seven witnesses (but not in the Hereford manuscript), as well as various glosses which are printed by Rusch but do not occur in any of the eight selected manuscripts. Other glosses unique to one of the manuscripts have been recorded in the apparatus. This is justified as a middle-ground between two extremes: giving only the Hereford text and relegating all other readings to the apparatus, on the one hand, and trying to capture all the variants of the early tradition in a single text, on the other. The result is a reasonable conspectus of the earliest versions of this part of the Gloss, though the resulting text, inevitably, is one which never appeared in a medieval manuscript. This is yet another example of the difficulty of confining the variance of a medieval text within the Procrustean bed of the modern printed edition. A n electronic version would have been able to provide full parallel transcriptions of each of the nine witnesses used here. The apparatus is detailed and thorough. The sources of each section of the text—vital information in a compilation like this— are exhaustively documented, as well as being summarised in an 200 Reviews author index. The text is set out in a single, linear sequence of prose and does not attempt to reproduce the multi-layered mise-en-page of the original...