Review article
Editing early wordlists
The Werden A Glossary: Edition and Commentary. (). Turnhout: Brepols, 2025. 317 pp. ISBN 978-2-503-61248-5 € 185.00
Publication history
Table of contents
A great many dictionaries and wordlists — “glossaries”, as medievalists call them, although this word is used in a more restricted sense in later periods — survive from medieval Europe, and many of them remain unedited. Good editions of primary texts are to be desired in every historical field, but the need for good editions of wordlists is particularly pressing. In early lexicography, the relationships between primary witnesses are complex: where does one lexicographical tradition end, and another, derived from it or akin to it, begin? The story of intertextual relationships which links a wordlist with its non-lexicographical sources is, likewise, often exceedingly intricate. Moreover, the texts of the wordlists, rich in the decontextualized rare words which tend to lead copyists astray, are often very faulty. These are all problems which require editorial work to resolve them. So, readers of early dictionaries owe a particular debt to the editors of the primary sources which they use, particularly when the results of their work are as good as A. N. Doane’s excellent edition of the so-called “Werden A” wordlist.
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