The ''Laud Herbal Glossary'' (MS Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 587) is a twelfth-century copy of the single biggest compilation of plant-name glosses of its time in England, rooted in

Anglo-Saxon The Anglo-Saxons were a Cultural identity, cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of the Anglo- ...

sources. Its lemmata are mostly Latin, and these are mostly glossed into

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 ...

/ Middle English. Although the Laud Herbal Glossary drew on many sources, its main sources for vernacular glosses are a list of plant-names in the Greek primer, the ''

Hermeneumata Pseudo-Dositheana The ''Hermeneumata'' ( el, Ἑρμηνεύματα; also known as the ''Hermeneumata Pseudodositheana'' or ''Hermeneumata pseudo-Dositheana'') are anonymous instructional manuals written in the third century CE to teach the Greek language to Latin- ...

'' (the best preserved manuscript of which appears to be Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale, 1828–30, folios 94–95, which gives the names under the title 'Nomina herbarum Grece et Latine'); the ''

Old English Herbarium 210px, Manuscript Kassel; 9th century, Mandragora Pseudo-Apuleius is the name given in modern scholarship to the author of a 4th-century herbal known as ''Pseudo-Apuleius Herbarius'' or ''Herbarium Apuleii Platonici''. The author of the text appare ...

''; and a text very like the ''

Durham Plant-Name Glossary The ''Durham Plant-Name Glossary'' (MS Durham, Cathedral Library, Hunter 100) is a glossary translating Latin and Greek plant-names into Old English/Middle English. It was copied in Durham in the early twelfth century. Its principal sources were Gr ...

''.Rusche, Philip Guthrie. 2008. ‘The sources for plant names in Anglo-Saxon England and the Laud Herbal Glossary’, in ''Health and Healing in the Medieval Garden'', ed. by Peter Dendle and Alan Touwaide, 128–44. Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer.

References

Old English literature Glossaries Botany books 12th-century books {{botany-book-stub