Open Access Digital Text Editions: St Gall Priscian glosses

St Gall Priscian glosses
Rijcklof Hofman (transcription), Pádraic Moran (digital edition)

The St Gall Priscian

St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, ms 904 is a copy, written in ad 850–1, of Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae (Foundations of Grammar), a monumental treatise on Latin grammar completed c. 526/7, in which the author aimed to synthesize much of the Greek and Latin grammatical traditions. The text was edited by Martin Hertz for Heinrich Keil (ed.), Grammatici Latini (6 vols, Leipzig, 1855–80) [vols 2–3].

The manuscript was written in Irish script, probably in Ireland, and contains over 9,400 interlinear and marginal glosses, in addition to c. 4,000 construe marks (symbols to aid reading). More than one-third of these glosses were written in Old Irish, and as such constitute one of our most important corpora for that phase of the Irish language.

About the digital edition

The Old Irish glosses were published in Whitley Stokes and John Strachan (eds), Thesaurus Palaeohibernicus (2 vols, London, 1901–1910), vol. 2, pp. 49–224. More recently, Rijcklof Hofman published roughly the first half of all of the glosses (Irish, Latin and symbols) in The Sankt Gall Priscian Commentary. Part 1 (2 vols, Münster, 1996). The present digital edition presents the first complete transcription of all of the glosses, juxtaposed with the text of Priscian, and with links to images of the manuscript and other resources.

The transcription was very generously supplied by Rijcklof Hofman and the digital edition created by Pádraic Moran. The text of Priscian was made available thanks to the kindness of the Corpus Grammaticorum Latinorum project. The manuscript images are available at the Codices Electronici Sangallenses (CESG) Virtual Library.

The work forms part of a two-year postdoctoral research project (2009– ) by Pádraic Moran, investigating the cultural contexts of the Priscian glosses. It is funded by the Irish Research Council for Humanities and Social Sciences and based in Classics (School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures) at the National University of Ireland, Galway.