2. Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources

Scholars 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, Fascicules VI–XIII (M–Reg) have already been published, and Fascicule XIV (Reg–Sal) is in press, to be released in 2012. Preparation of Fascicules XV (apporx. Sal–Son)and XVI (approx. Son–Sut) is well advanced, and drafting work is already in progress on the remainder of the alphabet. The project is expected to be completed in 2014.

The Dictionary began as a project of the British Academy housed at the Public Record Office in London. From 1982 until 2010 it was based in the Clarendon Building of the Bodleian Library, but at the start of 2011 it moved to more spacious premises in the Department of Plant Sciences.

The first editor, R. E. Latham, was succeeded in 1979 by Dr David Howlett, who directed the project for 32 years until his retirement in October 2011. His successor, Dr Richard Ashdowne, currently leads a team of five Assistant Editors in the task of bringing the Dictionary to completion. Dr Howlett remains closely involved in work on the dictionary as a Consulting Editor, and the project is also fortunate to enjoy the invaluable expertise of Peter Glare, editor of the Oxford Latin Dictionary, as Consulting Editor.

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 tributary languages 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 associated with the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from Celtic Sources sponsored by the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin, sources for which have been digitised, 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 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 itself.

A brief recent account of the history of the dictionary can be found in: Richard Ashdowne, ‘“ut Latine minus vulgariter magis loquamur”: the making of the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources’, in C. Stray (ed.), Classical Dictionaries, past, present and future (Duckworth, 2010), 195–222.

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