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2. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British SourcesScholars began to collect quotations on which to base a dictionary of Medieval Latin in 1924. The Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources was published in 1934 and reissued five times before the appearance in 1965 of the Revised Medieval Latin Word-List, which was reissued with a Supplement in 1980. In 1965 work began on the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, of which Fascicule I (A-B) appeared in 1975. Volume I, Fascicules I-V (A-L), was completed in 1997. The first parts of Volume II, Fascicules VI (M), VII (N), VIII (O), and IX (P-Pel) appeared in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2005. Fascicule X (Pel-Phi) is at press, to be published in the autumn of 2006. Preparation of Fascicules XI and XII is well advanced, and Fascicule XIII is being drafted. It is hoped to complete the project by 2011. The Dictionary on historical principles began as a project of the British Academy housed at the Public Record Office in London. Since 1982, it has been based in the Clarendon Building of the Bodleian Library. It has been edited since 1979 by Dr David Howlett, now assisted by Mr Theodore Christchev, Dr Carolinne White, Dr Prydwyn Piper, Dr Shelagh Sneddon, Mrs Pamela Catling and Mr Peter Glare from a collection of about one million quotation slips, supplemented by many millions of quotations in an archive of digitised texts. Drs Howlett and White are Research Fellows of the Faculty of Classics. The Dictionary represents the Latin language as written in the British Isles and by Britons abroad from Gildas (AD 540) to Camden (1600), a canon of more than 2,300 named authors, many anonymous writers, and an archive of diplomatic and administrative documents roughly ten times the size of the literary corpus. It illustrates a continuous tradition of thought and composition in language based upon and derived from the highest literary register of Classical and Late Latin, but also incorporating lexical and syntactic elements from the vernacular languages spoken and written in these islands, Greek, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, and Semitic. The period covered is the longest of any of the national dictionaries of Medieval Latin, the corpus the largest and most varied, and the range of other languages that left traces in Latin the greatest. The Dictionary is an essential resource for philologists, diplomatists, historians, philosophers, theologians, epigraphers, musicologists, genealogists, and other students of the rich literature of Medieval Latin written over one thousand one hundred years. The project is closely associated with the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic Sources sponsored by the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, sources for which are digitised on a CD-Rom, and with the Novum Glossarium Mediae Latinitatis sponsored by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique at the Institut de France in Paris. It is closely associated also with the Oxford English Dictionary at Oxford University Press, the Dictionary of Old English at the University of Toronto and the Anglo-Norman Dictionary, as the archive includes many words borrowed from vernacular languages in Latin forms, often hundreds of years earlier than the first recorded usage in the vernacular. The range of sources for this project, the house library, traditional quotation slips, microfilms, microfiches, concordances printed and on-line, are accessible to users by appointment.
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October 9, 2008.
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