Using Medieval Latin: A Toolbox of Resources
by Carol D. Lanham

[updated 17 June 1999]

Using Dictionaries

On to the mundane challenge of working with medieval Latin texts at the level of the words on the page. The more classical Latin you have read, the better: You will be better equipped to recognize the echoes and allusions from classical literature that pervade even hard-core ecclesiastical writers, whose education was still founded on Vergil and Horace and Cicero and Sallust. But a knowledge of classical Latin only is positively dangerous for a medievalist. It encourages thinking statically, whereas both the syntax and lexicon of Latin continued to change. Latin was most definitely a living language, spoken and written over a vast geographical area during a time span of more than a thousand years. To quote George Rigg’s article on “Latin Language” in the Dictionary of the Middle Ages, “There is no such thing as Medieval Latin, if by it is meant a language with a fixed grammar and vocabulary; there are simply varieties of Latin written in the Middle Ages” (353).

It is these “varieties” that often make it difficult to pin down word-meanings. Take, for instance, the language of Christianity (for the concept of “Christian Latin” as a separate dialect or even language, see the Language and Style section of the Bibliography). From the very beginning, Christians gave special senses to many words, including such common words as fides, gloria, regnum, salus, even homo (Mohrmann, “Le latin médiéval,” Etudes 2 [1961] 206–207); by the twelfth century some of these words had developed additional secular meanings as well—and clever writers were quick to exploit the three-way polyvalence that resulted.

These “varieties” of Latin also account for the multiplication of what one might anachronistically call national lexica: medieval Latin from British sources, or Catalonian, or Dutch, and so forth—any or all of which you may need to consult. To take one recent example I know of, if you were burning to find just one attested parallel for the meaning “heavy frost” given to cauma, a word that ordinarily means “heat,” you would rejoice to find it in the dictionary of medieval Latin from Polish sources! These several projects represent a fall-back position from a noble, but doomed, international attempt to create a grand, unified dictionary of medieval Latin to replace Du Cange, first published in 1678.

Having mentioned Du Cange—Charles du Fresne, sieur de Du Cange—I’d like to share a charming anecdote about him that I found in the preface to the last edition of his dictionary:

His life is summed up in one word: work. This was the great joy and the profound consolation of his existence. He regularly worked fourteen hours a day. If we may be permitted to cite a characteristic trait of his devotion to learning: On the very day of his marriage, upon leaving the nuptial ceremony he shut himself up for six hours in his library, “en tête à tête” with his books; he came to prove to them that his new affection did not make him forget his beloved studies. [My translation]

His motto was nulla dies sine linea, No day without a line!

Probably some scholars are comfortable using Du Cange, but I’m not, and even if I were, I wouldn’t recommend starting there to investigate a puzzling Latin word. To illustrate how the major dictionaries compare in their scope and usefulness for later Latin, I’ve chosen a word whose meaning developed in an interesting way: metator, from a letter in Cyprian’s collection (mid-3rd c.). Below, I give the text and translation of the sentence in which metator appears, followed by a reproduction and discussion of the metator entry from each of five dictionaries. (Only one of the other six dictionaries that I checked has an entry for metator: Blatt’s Novum Glossarium.)

Cyprian, epist. 22.1 (Lucian to Celerinus):
Nam tu, Deo volente, ipsum anguem maiorem, metatorem Antichristi,…terruisti.
“For you, by God’s will, have terrified the greater serpent himself, the precursor of Antichrist” [trans. Fathers of the Church 51]

In classical Latin, metator had a very specific meaning, chiefly military. The question I faced was, how to get from the classical “one who measures” to the “precursor” of the translation? I would recommend always going first to Lewis and Short: for medievalists it is regularly more useful than the Oxford Latin Dictionary, which as you will recall cuts off at about 200 A.D.

(To open larger copies of any of the text images into a larger window, press on the image.)

Their respective entries for this word neatly illustrate their differences. The OLD gives a single, literal definition; the Lewis and Short entry is slightly broader and includes quotations from Christian writers.

Forcellini, like Lewis and Short, distinguishes two basic categories of definition, literal and figurative; note that these two articles include citations of Christian authors, Lactantius and Tertullian. Comparing Forcellini with the Thesaurus linguae latinae will give you some idea of what is available from Forcellini where the Thesaurus doesn’t yet exist: I’ve often found Forcellini quite helpful, and the quotations tend to be generous, as here. This letter comes out of a powerfully Christian context—the vicious persecutions of the mid-third century instituted by the emperor Decius, this “precursor of Antichrist.” So one might have gone straight from Lewis and Short

to Blaise’s Dictionary of Christian Latin, and there indeed we find this very passage cited; although Blaise does give literal definitions, the quoted examples all represent metaphorical uses.

But it is the Thesaurus entry, which also cites our passage, that demonstrates how metator won its new life in the vocabulary of Christianity. (Unfortunately, we can’t yet consult the Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch—now only in C—for the word’s later, medieval history.) TLL’s entry for metator is about 75 lines long—a good size to illustrate most of the features of this mammoth dictionary, but not so long as to be overpowering.

Anyone who expects to do scholarly work with Latin texts, whether classical or medieval, must learn to use the Thesaurus linguae latinae, which is indeed a treasure-house. The keyword, always, is patience. It’s terribly tempting to skim, even a short article, hoping to spot just the definition you need. But if you will take the time to work slowly through a few entries of this length, you’ll be less likely to give up in despair upon confronting a really long article—if, say, you want to study the topos “urbs et orbis,” and you find the best part of fifteen full columns devoted to orbis. And if you’re trying to identify the source of a quotation, you may hit pay dirt just by combing through an article; I illustrate later that aspect of a dictionary’s potential usefulness.

Now for the essential features of a TLL entry. Each page of the TLL contains two columns, separately numbered, with line numbers running down the middle between columns, so that you can find, or cite, a specific quotation or other reference very easily. The metator entry, which is in volume 8, runs from column 878 line 66 through column 879 line 55, or 8.878.66–879.55.

The first paragraph of an entry reports sources both ancient and modern that give information about the origin, etymology, gender, meaning, and variant spellings or forms of the word. If the article is very long, this section may also provide an outline of its subdivisions; a really complicated article, such as orbis, is divided into chapters.

(Please note that the large version of the TLL entry is rather large (245k) and will take some time to load.)

The maximum possible number of subdivisions seems to be eight. The entry for metator has only four, which I’ve circled and underlined throughout the article and show in outline form here. (Note: The next several paragraphs refer to the passage below: please click on the image so that you can refer to the text as you read on.)

The editorial apparatus is entirely in Latin. Thus, the very first comment, “a metari,” means “from <the verb> metari [to measure].” The source of each quotation is printed in caps + small caps. If the abbreviation “NON.” in the first line rings no bells, consult the Index scriptorum, a separate volume the revised version of which was published in 1990. It will identify “Non.” as Nonius Marcellus, an early fourth-century lexicographer and collector of antiquarian lore, and name the edition used by the TLL, to which the page and line numbers in the citations refer. Unless the work is regularly cited in a conventional form that is independent of editions (such as book and line, or chapter and section—e.g. Vergil, Horace, the Bible), you will have to look up that specific edition in the Index scriptorum if you want to see the larger context of any citation. The reference to our Cyprian text (at lines 30–31) includes both forms of citation.

A major dictionary’s index of editions cited can be used for other purposes as well. For example, the Index scriptorum for the Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch lists, under the headings Epistolae and Formulae, more than one page each of letter and formula collections, with their dates as well as the editions cited by the MLW. For the formula collections, which were an important source for my dissertation, the list gives a very convenient overview of their dates, as established by the editor of the MGH edition. Only after I had laboriously extracted that information from the many individual prefaces in the MGH edition did I discover the conspectus in the MLW.

On to line 69, where “GLOSS.” points to citations in the text below, column 878 lines 14–16. Latin glossaries, of which there are many, from the sixth century on, are dear to lexicographers because, by definition, they reflect uncertainty about the meanings of words: The meaning of the word being glossed may have changed, or it may be a recent coinage. Glossaries can be of more than purely linguistic use. For instance, a historian studying the growth of Frankish power in Gaul would be interested to learn that the eighth-century Glossary of Reichenau glosses the ancient term Gallia by Frantia (see Elcock, The Romance Languages, pp. 248, 323–335 on glosses and glossaries). And glosses may also attest readings earlier than, or different from, those in extant manuscripts. The next two items, in italics, refer to modern discussions about metator; “RE XV” = vol. 15 of Pauly-Wissowa.

Next come the various meanings, beginning at sensu originario (72) and moving from the broadest, the concrete and literal (73, proprie), to the figurative and metaphorical (78, translate, here confined to time), and the specialized (speciatim, 80). In general, each subdivision is arranged chronologically. Within the citations, the entry word (e.g. metator) “is represented by the shortest possible unambiguous abbreviation of its ending” (Praemonenda p. 33)—e.g. in line 3, “-r dicitur …” If a word within a citation is italicized, as in line 2, appellantur, it means that either this form of the word or the word itself has been supplied from the context by the author of the dictionary article. Examples from a special field, such as rhetoric or medicine, will usually be grouped together. At the end there may even be a special section surveying constructions or kinds of phrases, such as noun-adjective pairings, in which the word is found.

If you are doing a diachronic study of a Latin word or concept, it can be helpful to look back on it from the standpoint of much later linguistic developments. In that case, etymological dictionaries of the Romance languages, of which I give only a sampling in the Bibliography, are the next place to explore. And don’t overlook the etymological and historical information in encyclopedic modern dictionaries such as the OED and the dictionary of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French, the Trésor de la langue française.

CD-ROM and other collections of digitized Latin texts, such as those listed in the Bibliography's CD-ROMs, can greatly simplify the data-collecting stage of systematic word and concept studies. They do not, however, supplant dictionaries, nor will all scholars have ready access to them. The productive use of dictionaries for such diachronic studies is well exemplified by an article published by a UCLA graduate student. In “Compilatio: From Plagiarism to Compiling” (Viator 20 [1989] 19–44), Neil Hathaway traced the transformation of compilare from the CL meaning ‘rob, plunder, plagiarize’ to a neutral sense in the twelfth century; in the process, his investigation widened to include the broader vocabulary that describes the activity of compiling texts such as florilegia. As a result, he was able to challenge conclusions drawn by scholars much his senior who had disregarded the earlier history of this word family. His article also made a contribution to an ongoing international project (its acronym is CIVICIMA) to survey the vocabulary of intellectual life in the Middle Ages—not the content of the various disciplines but the instruments, methods, and products of intellectual work (e.g. vocabulary of schools and teaching methods, book production and writing).

Finally, I mentioned using dictionaries to identify the source of a quotation (or rather, to identify a piece of text as being a quotation). This is admittedly a long shot, most likely to work if (a) the text in question contains at least one unusual word, and (b) if you can search texts electronically. Medieval writers were inclined to borrow freely, often verbatim and without any attribution, from their predecessors—another argument for reading widely! Here is an example of successful dictionary-based detection.¹

On the left are excerpts from two rather bizarre letters dated to the late eighth century by their editor, the late and very distinguished Bernhard Bischoff. I zeroed in on the underlined sentence, which stuck out as foreign. The only faintly uncommon word in it is alveus, ‘river-bed’; even so the Thesaurus has three full columns of 84 lines each under alveus. (Tenuiter might also work, but remember that the TLL is still making its way through P; one can however consult the voluminous word-files in Munich, or deputize a colleague to do so.) I was already aware that other letters in this peculiar collection showed acquaintance with St. Jerome’s letters, and so when the Thesaurus article on alveus cited four of them I flew off to the library. I quickly found the entire sentence in Jerome’s letter 17, and soon uncovered still more borrowings from Jerome’s letters—and the secret of this letter-writer’s technique of compilatio, which we moderns must struggle not to regard as plagiarizing. Making such a discovery is valuable in itself; it may also enable you to emend the text or to draw inferences about sources or even specific manuscripts used by the writer. (I must confess that my pleasure at identifying these borrowings was considerably enhanced by Bischoff’s having missed them.)

¹ From Bengt Löfstedt and Carol D. Lanham, “Zu den neugefundenen Salzburger Formelbüchern und Briefen,” Eranos 63 (1975), concerning a collection of document and epistolary formulas and model letters from the 8th–9th centuries, 69–100 at 96.