Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources

The Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources

Completed in print in 2013, the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources represents the Latin language as written in the British Isles and by Britons abroad from Gildas (mid-sixth century) to Camden (end of the sixteenth century), 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. The completed Dictionary runs to more than 55,000 entries and more than 4,000 pages.

The DMLBS forms the British part of an international scheme co-ordinated by the Union Académique Internationale to document the vocabulary of medieval Latin across Europe: a number of these other projects are also complete, while others are still ongoing. The period covered by DMLBS 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 the Latin the greatest. The DMLBS is, in short, the most comprehensive survey of medieval Latin to have been produced and the first ever to focus on British medieval Latin. 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 more than one thousand years not only in Britain but around Europe.

Based entirely on original research, the Dictionary was the result of a century-long British Academy research project, first proposed in 1913. After many decades gathering material, editing began in the 1960s and the first part, covering A and B, was published in 1975. The project moved to Oxford in 1982 and was formally adopted as a Classics Faculty project (still in collaboration with the British Academy) in 1999.

The project was disbanded in 2014 after the Dictionary was completed. The completed Dictionary is available in print and online.

Further details:

Editor: Dr Richard Ashdowne
Website: http://www.dmlbs.ox.ac.uk
Blog: https://dmlbs.wordpress.com