The Worcester Herbal Glossary: Edition and Commentary

Abstract

This study offers the first full edition of a late thirteenth-century herbal glossary preserved in Worcester, Cathedral Library, F 157, as well as a preliminary commentary of textual problems and analogues. This glossary (henceforth: Worcester Herbal Glossary) originally included around 130 Latin plant names with English equivalents; a few entries are lost today because of a lacuna in the manuscript. So far, only a partial – and at times inaccurate – edition of the glossary appeared in Floyer and Hamilton (1906: 184–185). Since then, this lexicographic collection of plant names has been almost wholly ignored by scholars. Remarkably, the Worcester Herbal Glossary seems to originate from a substantial batch of entries from the chapter on the names of herbs in Ælfric’s Glossary. This batch was expanded by means of other material which must have circulated in the Early Middle English period. This additional material parallels entries found in other botanical glossaries of the period – such as that preserved in London, British Library, Harley 978 – and, above all, finds striking analogues in the Middle English recension of the Salernitan medico-botanical glossary known as Alphita (Mowat 1887).