Nomina Membrorum in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 730

INTRODUCTION

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 730 (2709) is a twelfth-century codex produced at Buildwas, which preserves a copy of Cassian's Collationes.¹ On the last three leaves of the final quire (fols. 144–146),² scribes from the early thirteenth century onward copied four fragments of late Old English/early Middle English glossaries and of Anglo-Norman and Middle English glosses. Hunt and Ziegler first published the glosses and glossaries in two separate articles in 1981.³ While a comprehensive analysis of the texts remains to be undertaken,⁴ the present study proposes sources and analogues for the nomina membrorum preserved in the manuscript's fourth glossary.

The first glossary (fols. 144ra–144vb) includes Anglo-Norman and Middle English entries, mostly consisting of interlinear glosses.⁵ A second item (fols. 144vb–145rb), a Latin-Old English glossary arranged thematically, shows "a clear relationship"⁶ to the Second Cleopatra Glossary (Cleo II) preserved in London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra A. iii, although with omissions and variations in order.⁷ More specifically, the second glossary in Bodley 730 opens with a small section drawn from the chapter De homine et de partibus eius found in Cleo II, followed by wide extracts from the sections De avibus, De piscibus, De textrinalibus, De lectulo, De lignis, and De herbis terrae of Cleo II. Between De lectulo and De lignis, other glosses from the chapter De textrinalibus and an extract from the chapter De igne have been interpolated.⁸ A third item (fol. 145rb) features some Anglo-Norman and Middle English glosses scattered within mostly Latin material.⁹ This third item concludes with the short poem Sol calet igne meo/Neptunus fervet in undis¹⁰ and is followed by four hymns to the Virgin, which were copied by a different hand (fols. 145va–146rb).¹¹

THE PARTS OF THE BODY AND ÆLFRIC'S GLOSSARY

The fourth item is a Latin-Old English class glossary including two vocabularies, one on the parts of the body and one on the members of Church and family (fol. 146rb–v).¹² Hunt argued that the list preserved on fol. 146 "basically corresponds to Ælfric's glossary,"¹³ a view that I shall discuss later on.¹⁴ On fol. 146rb, a hand similar to the one responsible for the second glossary¹⁵ started the list of the parts of the body, which was then interrupted and begun again on fol. 146va. The first column of the folio mostly includes a single gloss per line, a pattern abandoned in the second column (146vb). A different scribe took over at the bottom of fol. 146vb. The main scribe then resumed on the third column, fol. 146vc, where from two to three glosses are clustered on every line.

A comparison between the first list of parts of the body, which the scribe started and interrupted on fol. 146rb, and the beginning of the second list on fol. 146va shows some differences: the first list has caput for capud, necdel for necadel, naris uel nasus for nasus uel naris, hær for her, fæx for fex; -heafod is an interlinear gloss for the interpretamentum forheafd; some variations in the order of the glosses also occur. These differences suggest that the exemplar copied on fol. 146v was different from that copied on 146rb, and that the scribe was copying from his sources with little or no alteration. In my opinion, the scribe started his list from the beginning on fol. 146v because his second source was more extended, or complete, than the first one.

A closer study of this fuller list supports this hypothesis. The chapter on the nomina membrorum of Bodley 730 includes 140 lemmata (three of which do not bear any English interpretamenta); it is, therefore, more extensive than the one in Ælfric's Glossary, which features 101 entries (including plural forms) and that, as mentioned above, has been considered by some scholars to be a proximate source of the chapter in Bodley 730. Although with some deviations, Ælfric's chapter on the parts of the body loosely follows the head...