Old English and Latin Glosses to Aldhelm's Prose Treatise on Virginity and the 'Canterbury Glossaries'

The following pages are excerpted with slight alteration from the introductory volume of my book, Aldhelmi Malmesbiriensis Pros a de virginitate cum glosa latina at que anglosaxonica. 1 The preceding sections of my introduction identify dozens of glossing layers chiefly in Anglo-Saxon manuscripts of Aldhelm's popular treatise, and trace the development of each layer from one source to the next. Sometimes it is possible to theorize a lost manuscript whose glosses were intermediate to those in extant copies. A corpus of about 60,000 glosses to the Prosa de virginitate (Pdv) obviously developed over generations, but a collation of these glosses reveals a few hundred common to six manuscripts (and sometimes as many as ten) with connections to Canterbury. I propose that this stratum of glosses, which I call the 'Common Recension', represents the earliest record for the study of Aldhelm's Pdv and the first evidence of scholarship on a native English author.