English Glosses from British Library Additional Manuscript 37075 ed. by Thomas W. Ross, Edward Brooks, Jr. (review)

REVIEWS THOMAS W. Ross and EDWARD BROOKS, JR., eds. English Glosses from British Library Additional Manuscript 37075. Norman, Okla.: Pil­ grim Books, 1984. Pp. xv, 160. $39.95. British Library Additional MS 37075 is "a massive manual of instruction" compiled in the late fifteenth century, almost certainly for the use of a schoolmaster in the education of young prospective clerks. From this Thomas Ross and Edward Brooks have extracted and printed several series of Latin-English vocabularies, including a nominale (fols. 309ff.). The interest ofsuch works is primarily linguistic, or as an indication oftedious medieval instructional methods, but the present word lists have some humorous touches- the addition of some glosses possibly occasioned by the suggestibility of the prurient schoolboy (or schoolmaster?) mind on folio 323v and the jotting down (twice) of a clever homosexual verse on folios 244 and 275. The entries are attractively presented, with such nonessential material as Latin principal parts omitted. A comparison of the frontispiece with the text reveals no errors oftranscription, though it is not clear why the editors should retain the indefinite article found in the manuscript for some English glosses and not for others, e.g., "costa, rybbe," "os, bone," "tibea, legge," yet "femur, crus, a thy," "scrutum, a trype," "diafragma, a mydrefe." The six-page introduction is rather slight. The editors appear to have been unaware of the long and detailed description of the manuscript in David Thomson, A Descriptive Catalogue ofMiddle English Grammatical Texts (New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1979), pp. 219-32. Some discrepancies exist between the twoaccounts; e.g., Additional 37075 has 385 paper leaves (Ross and Brooks), 413 paper and parchment leaves (Thomson). Thomson carefully lists the hands of the manuscript, which range between the mid- and the late fifteenth century; Ross and Brooks simply note the existence of several hands, "all... from the late fifteenth century," and do not clearly differentiate hands within the body of the edited text. Ross and Brooks suggest that at least a part of the manuscript was copied at Warwick, but Thomson is probably correct that the phrase "a Warrewyke" preserves the name of the scribe. The former associate the manuscript with Saint Anthony's School in London and note the occur­ rence of the name Claveryng, "a noted North Country family"; Thomson 237 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER recordsJohn Claveryng as the major scribe and assembler of the compila­ tion and would identify him as a rector of that name of three parishes in the London area in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Thomson also indicates a possible connection withJohn Carpenter, master of Saint Anthony's Hospital in 1441, when the grammar school was sanctioned, who was earlier associated with the foundation of Eton(pp. 17-18), and points out that the compiled manual of teaching materials belonged to the school rather than to the individual schoolmaster. I have a few quibbles about individual points in the introduction. Some of the nominates in Thomas Wright, ed., Anglo-Saxon and Old English Vocabularies, 2d ed., rev. Richard PaulWiilcker(London, 1884), are closer in organization and lexis to Additional 37075 than is the Promptorium parvulorum, which is suggested as a similar work (p. ix). Paddystolys "toadstools" is not a totally unrecorded word(pp. ix, 15); it is, rather, an otherwise unrecorded spelling with -i- ofpad(d)estol(see MED, s.v.pad(e n.; OED, s.v. pad sb.1; cf. English Dialect Dictionary, s.v. pad sb.3). Similarly,on p. xii, messelyne "mixed grain"is just anearlieroccurrenceof this spelling than hitherto known(see OED, s.v. mas/in sb.2; MED, s.v. mestelion n. and cf. mas/inn.); trefoldis an unrecorded substantive sense of threefold, rather than an unrecorded word; borowe "pledge" is in MED as a variant spelling of borgh n.; mantyll probably means "mantle" and not "mantel," for I can find no evidence for medieval Latin c!amis (classical Latin chlamys, from Greek) meaning anything other than "cloak" (in which case the word is amply represented from earlier sources in MED, s.v. mantel n.); maindyr may not be a new word but a total scribal corruption of some form of "adder," as...