The Old French Glosses of an Anonymous Peshat Commentary on the Song of Songs

This essay is a philological note on the Old French glosses inserted in the anonymous Peshat Commentary on Song of Songs (Oxford, Bodleian MS Opp. 625 [Ol. 1370] [Neub. 1465]). Each of the glosses (some of them consist in more than one word and constitute little syntagms) is analyzed from the point of view of Old French linguistics and medieval French literature and civilization (including realia). Some dialectal characteristics hint at an Anglo-Norman or continental Norman origin of the glosses, which could shed a new light on the history of the text. When possible, those glosses are also compared with similar (but not identical) glosses in other texts of French Jewish origin. Moreover, the specific meanings of those glosses, some of them super-commentaries inasmuch as they gloss the Hebrew commentaries of the biblical letter and not necessarily the biblical terms themselves, confirm what has been already stated by Sarah Japhet and Barry Walfish regarding the quite heterodox contents conveyed by this exegetic work.