The Cleopatra Glossaries are three Latin-Old English glossaries all found in the manuscript

Cotton Cleopatra This is an incomplete list of some of the manuscripts from the Cotton library that today form the Cotton collection of the British Library. Some manuscripts were destroyed or damaged in a fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, and a few are kept in othe ...

A.iii (once held in the Cotton library, now held in the

British Library The British Library is the national library of the United Kingdom and is one of the largest libraries in the world. It is estimated to contain between 170 and 200 million items from many countries. As a legal deposit library, the British ...

). The glossaries constitute important evidence for

Old English Old English (, ), or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, Anglo ...

vocabulary, as well as for learning and scholarship in early medieval England generally. The manuscript was probably written at St Augustine's, Canterbury, and has generally been dated to the mid-tenth century, though recent work suggests the 930s specifically. The glossaries have no connection with

Cleopatra Cleopatra VII Philopator ( grc-gre, Κλεοπάτρα Φιλοπάτωρ}, "Cleopatra the father-beloved"; 69 BC10 August 30 BC) was Queen of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt from 51 to 30 BC, and its last active ruler.She was also a ...

herself: they are so named because when kept in the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton, the volume containing them was stored in a bookcase below a bust of Cleopatra.

Content

The ''First Cleopatra Glossary'' (folios 5r-75v) is alphabeticised by first letter, drawing on a wide range of sources, including a glossary more or less identical to the ''Third Cleopatra Glossary'', material related to the '' Corpus Glossary'', and a glossed text of

Isidore of Seville Isidore of Seville ( la, Isidorus Hispalensis; c. 560 – 4 April 636) was a Spanish scholar, theologian, and archbishop of Seville. He is widely regarded, in the words of 19th-century historian Montalembert, as "the last scholar of ...

's ''Etymologiae''. Some of these sources are among the earliest glosses in English, but the Cleopatra reviser (or his source) often revised them. The glossary only gets as far as P: the compilation or copying seems never to have been completed. The ''Second Cleopatra Glossary'' (folios 76r-91v) contains a shorter glossary, organised by subject. A closely related glossary is found in the first three subject lists of the

Brussels Glossary Brussels (french: Bruxelles or ; nl, Brussel ), officially the Brussels-Capital Region (All text and all but one graphic show the English name as Brussels-Capital Region.) (french: link=no, Région de Bruxelles-Capitale; nl, link=no, Bruss ...

(Brussels, Royal Library, 1928-30). The ''Third Cleopatra Glossary'' (folios 92r-117v) contains glosses to

Aldhelm Aldhelm ( ang, Ealdhelm, la, Aldhelmus Malmesberiensis) (c. 63925 May 709), Abbot of Malmesbury Abbey, Bishop of Sherborne, and a writer and scholar of Latin poetry, was born before the middle of the 7th century. He is said to have been the so ...

's ''Prosa de virginitate'' and ''Carmen de virginitate'', with the lemmata in the same order as they appear in the text. It was presumably, therefore, based on a copy of Aldhelm's texts which had interlinear glosses. This glossary or one like it was influential, influencing Byrhtferth of Ramsey and at least one Anglo-Saxon medical text. Kittlick's linguistic investigation showed that some, at least, of the glosses in the ''Third Cleopatra Glossary'' are in the Anglian dialect of Old English, with later overlays from West Saxon and Kentish (probably in that order). The glossary—though not necessarily all its entries—must have originated in the eighth century. About two thirds of the material in the ''Cleopatra Glossaries'' also occurs in the later ''

Harley Glossary The ''Harley Glossary'' is an Anglo-Saxon glossary, mostly providing glosses on Latin words. It mainly survives in the fragmentary British Library, MS Harley 3376 (which preserves the first six alphabetical sections, from "A" to "F"), but two fragme ...

''.Phillip Pulsiano, ‘Prayers, Glosses and Glossaries’, in ''A Companion to Anglo-Saxon Literature'', ed. by Phillip Pulsiano and Elaine Treharne (Oxford, 2001), p. 218

External links

Cotton MS Cleopatra A III at the British Library

References

{{Old English Glossaries Old English literature Glossaries