Forskningsarrangementer

Open Guest Lecture by Professor Rosamond McKitterick

The most basic form of all for the conveyance of knowledge and migration of ideas, however, is not just the texts but the individual words. From the end of the seventh century a remarkable quantity of glossaries, dictionaries and thematic word lists from the early middle ages survives. They have received attention from philologists but the glossaries' creation, as an historical and phenomenon needs to be explained. Early medieval glossaries and glossary chrestomathies are a collective statement of cultural affiliation. They offered a bridge to the Latin past constructed from the most basic elements of the textual inheritance of the compilers, designed to enhance literate communication in the present as well as for future generations. This paper will discuss the context in which some of the earliest glossaries were compiled, with a particular focus on the work of Winithar of St Gallen in the second half of the eighth century, two or three decades before the gathering of scholars at Charlemagne's court really got underway. Winithar's curiosity and industry, zest for learning and exuberant love of words is caught in a number of codices, and with a zeal so well communicated that it underlay the pattern of book production and transmission of knowledge not just in the monastery of St Gallen, but also elsewhere in Christian Europe for the next century and a half.