5 - Glosses and Scribbles

Summary

The previous two chapters have discussed all book-hands in the corpus, as well as assorted brief additions and notes. However, two other forms of script evidence survive which have not yet been considered: glosses and scribbles. Although these could have been discussed in the context of book-hands, such an approach risks blurring any distinction between scripts in the three types of writing. Indeed, Bernhard Bischoff has argued for two distinct grades of Caroline script, the book-hand and the gloss-script, and it is an important question whether the same distinction was used in English vernacular script. Similarly, short scribbles in manuscripts were often, one presumes, written quickly and with little regard to the scribal conventions found in book-hands. To consider scribbles and glosses together with book-hands without distinction therefore also risks skewing the data and producing an inaccurate picture of these book-hands. This chapter will thus present a discussion of these two types of script and will determine what difference, if any, there is as a result of their function.

Glosses

Corpus of Glosses

Glosses here are defined as Old English words which have been written in a manuscript, either interlineally or in the margins, to provide additional information (usually the meaning) about the text so glossed. ‘Glosses’ in the sense of Old English words in glossaries are not considered here, as these form an integral part of the main text and are generally written in the same script, if not the same grade of script.