Medieval Latin-English Dictionary

This book is a response to a need often expressed by both students and researchers in philology, medieval studies, church Latin and related fields in the humanities. This modern dictionary gives as exhaustive a list as possible of the words with the variations as they appear in a set of unpublished 15th century manuscripts contained in the British Museum, called Medulla Grammatice. This hard-cover dictionary contains some 20,000 entries over 600 pages. In medieval times, grammar constituted the basis of all fields of study, whatever the subject might have been, whether philosophy, mathematics, rhetoric, etc. In fact, in all disciplines, explanatory texts were added and became the authorities in every aspect of knowledge or transmission of that knowledge. That is the reason why monks in the scriptoriums their lives reproducing texts with accompanying glosses and interlinear explanations, glossaries which were called medulla grammatice, or grammaticae, the marrow of grammar. Most of those glossaries are unknown to contemporary scholars. Several years ago, the author of the present dictionary spent over a year in the research library of the British Museum, in London, uncovering the beauty and the importance of some of the Medulla Grammatice manuscripts.