Teaching and Learning in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honour of Gernot R. Wieland

270 Pages·2017·2.49 MB·English

by  Greti Dinkova-Bruun

PUBLICATIONS
OF
THE JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL LATIN
11
PUBLICATIONS
OF
THE JOURNAL OF MEDIEVAL LATIN

A publication of The Medieval Latin Association of North America

General Editors:
Michael W. Herren, C.J. McDonough, Gernot Wieland
Associate Editors:
Alexander Andrée University of Toronto
Bernice M. Kaczynski McMaster University
John Magee University of Toronto
Greti Dinkova-Bruun Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies
Jean Meyers University of Montpellier
Carin Ruff Independent Scholar
David Townsend University of Toronto
Advisory Board:
Walter Berschin University of Heidelberg
James P. Carley York University
Paolo Chiesa University of Milan
Michael Lapidge Clare College Cambridge
Andy Orchard Pembroke College Oxford
A.G. Rigg University of Toronto
Danuta Shanzer University of Vienna
Brian Stock University of Toronto
Jan M. Ziolkowski Harvard University
TEACHING AND LEARNING IN
MEDIEVAL EUROPE

ESSAYS IN HONOUR OF GERNOT R. WIELAND

Edited by

Greti Dinkova-Bruun and Tristan Major

F
© 2017 Brepols Publishers n.v. Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any
form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
permission of the publisher.

D/2017/0095/94
ISBN 978-2-503-56843-0
e-ISBN 978-2-503-56844-7
DOI 10.1484/M.PJML-EB.5.110558
Printed on acid-free paper.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
ix Introduction
MEDIEVAL GLOSSING TRADITIONS
3 SINÉAD O’SULLIVAN, Text, Gloss, and Tradition in the Early Medieval West:
Expanding into a World of Learning
25 DAVID TOWNSEND, Passing over Queerness: Silence and Sexual Heterodoxy
in Walter of Châtillon’s Alexandreis
43 SIÂN ECHARD, Palimpsests of Place and Time in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s
Historia regum Britannie
61 LUCIA KORNEXL, Qwerby knowyst … ? – Tracing the Origin of “Signs”
in Late Middle English Latin Grammar Texts
ANGLO-SAXON LITERATURE
83 TRISTAN MAJOR, Ælfric of Eynsham and Self-Translation
111 FRANS VAN LIERE, The Old English Hexateuch Cotton Claudius B.IV
and its Readers
123 PATRIZIA LENDINARA, A Poem for All Seasons: Alcuin’s “O vos, est aetas”
MEDIEVAL LATIN LITERATURE: TEXTS AND CONTEXTS
149 SCOTT G. BRUCE, Clandestine Codices in the Captivity Narratives of Abbot
Maiolus of Cluny
163 ALEXANDER ANDRÉE, The Virtues of a Medieval Teacher: ingenium and memoria
in the Twelfth Century
173 GREGORY HAYS, The Dissuasio Valerii and its Commentators: Some
Supplementary Notes
MEDIEVAL LATIN LITERATURE: TEXTS AND MANUSCRIPTS
203 MICHAEL W. HERREN, An Eleventh-Century Travel Phrase-Book
in Demotic Greek
211 GRETI DINKOVA-BRUUN, How Do Waters Stay Above the Firmament?:
British Library, MS Additional 62130 and its “De aquis supra firmamentum
questio quedam”
223 Gernot R. Wieland: Bibliography, 1975–2016
231 Index of Manuscripts
235 General Index (Authors, People, Places, and Texts)

Introduction
Tristan Major
Qatar University
Gernot Rudolf Wieland has been influential to a number of scholars with whom he
has interacted during his career as Professor of English at the University of British
Columbia, as a Humboldt Fellow in Munich, and as general editor of The Journal of
Medieval Latin. He has been at the forefront of his field for his careful and influential
work on medieval glosses, his insights into aspects of Anglo-Saxon literature, and his
research and editorial work on medieval Latin literature.
In 1976 Wieland successfully defended his dissertation at the Centre for Medieval
Studies, University of Toronto, under the supervision of A.G. Rigg.1 At the time, the
field of Anglo-Latin studies was beginning to enter the first stages of its maturity,2 as it
became increasingly recognized that Anglo-Latin literature exhibits unique features
stemming from an educational system that focused on teaching the reading of specific
late antique and early medieval Latin texts.3 There had developed a growing
realization of the influence that late antique Christian Latin poets had on the literary
production of Anglo-Saxon literature. Not only were manuscripts of Arator, Boethius,
Juvencus, Lactantius, Prudentius, and Sedulius, among others, produced and
conserved in Anglo-Saxon England, but they were also read and frequently glossed.
Wieland’s dissertation, which would provide the basis for his influential book, The
Latin Glosses on Arator and Prudentius in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.5.35,
provided not only an in-depth analysis of the reception of Arator and Prudentius

1 “The Latin Glosses on Arator and Prudentius in University Library, Cambridge, MS.
Gg.5.35” (Ph.D. diss., University of Toronto, 1976). Wieland later honoured his Doktorvater
by co-editing a volume of essays with Siân Echard: Anglo-Latin and its Heritage: Essays in
Honour of A.G. Rigg on his 64th Birthday, ed. Siân Echard and Gernot R. Wieland, Publications
of the Journal of Medieval Latin 4 (Turnhout, 2001).
2 See, especially, the seminal articles by Michael Lapidge, “Three Latin Poems from
Æthelwold’s School at Winchester,” Anglo-Saxon England 1 (1972), 85–137; repr. in Anglo-
Latin Literature, 900–1066 (London, 1993), pp. 225–77; and “The Hermeneutic Style in
Tenth-Century Anglo-Latin Literature,” Anglo-Saxon England 4 (1975), 67–111; repr. in
Anglo-Latin Literature, 900–1066, pp. 105–49.
3 Fittingly, many of these texts can be found in Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg. 5.35,
the contents of which are described by Wieland in A.G. Rigg and Gernot Wieland, “A
Canterbury Classbook of the Mid-Eleventh Century (the ‘Cambridge Songs’ Manuscript),”
Anglo-Saxon England 4 (1975), 113–30, at pp. 120–29.

10.1484/M.PJML-EB.5.113250: ix–xix © FHG
ix
x Major
through glosses in Anglo-Saxon England, but also a methodology for understanding
how Anglo-Saxon glossators structured their elucidations of texts.4
From examining glosses in Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.5.35
(henceforth CUL Gg.5.35) Wieland discerned five categories for interpreting glosses.
Previously, glosses had been thought to be used primarily for lexical purposes and, for
that reason, bilingual glosses, which could inform the meaning of words in the
vernacular languages (or vice versa), took the chief place of research. This emphasis
on research of bilingual lexical glosses, however, ignored vast quantities of non-lexical
information in the much more frequent Latin-Latin glosses of the early Middle Ages.
Wieland’s early publications made a strong case for broadening research on all types
of glosses, which he ordered in the following categories: glosses on prosody, lexical
glosses, grammatical glosses, syntactical glosses, and commentary glosses.5 By giving a
clear framework for understanding lexical and non-lexical, monolingual and bilingual,
glosses, Wieland was able to provide a window into the late Anglo-Saxon classroom, a
topic that occupied much of his subsequent research. Specifically, he argued that the
range of types of glossing, as well as their sporadic appearance across texts of varying
degrees of difficultly, most plausibly reveals the interests of a teacher in the Anglo-
Saxon classroom.6
Wieland’s approach gave insight into the practical function of the different
categories of glosses as well as an explanation for the puzzling fact that manuscripts
are often only selectively glossed. He argues that this selectivity makes better sense as
a teaching aid for which the glosses act more as a reminder for the teacher to include
certain material in the lesson than as an aid for students reading the texts with
insufficient Latin. Moreover, the order of texts in CUL Gg.5.35 reveals a progression
of level of difficulty in language and interpretative depth of the texts. The first part of
the manuscript begins with Juvencus, whose Latin is relatively easy, and ends with
Boethius, whose Latin is relatively difficult. The interesting and important implication
is that CUL Gg.5.35 reveals not only a late Anglo-Saxon curriculum of Christian Latin
poetry but also how that poetry was actually taught.

4 Gernot Wieland, The Latin Glosses on Arator and Prudentius in Cambridge University Library
MS Gg.5.35, Studies and Texts 61 (Toronto, 1983).
5 Latin Glosses, passim; and Gernot Wieland, “Latin Lemma – Latin Glosses: The Stepchild of
Glossologists,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 19 (1984), 91–99, at pp. 96–97. Idem, “Interpreting
the Interpretation: The Polysemy of the Latin Gloss,” The Journal of Medieval Latin 8 (1998),
59–71, at p. 60, refines these categories to prosodic, lexical, morphological, syntactic,
commentary, and textual; see also idem, “Gloss and Illustration: Two Means to the Same
End?,” in Anglo-Saxon Manuscripts and their Heritage, ed. Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine M.
Treharne (Aldershot, 1998), pp. 1–20, at 5.
6 Wieland, Latin Glosses, pp. 196–98.