As she did in 1982 with the Hermeneumata Celtis, D. has enriched the field with a new ‘ancient’ text, previously unknown and now for the first time identified, critically edited and annotated. The MS transmitting this text, Expositio Notarum (EN), is an eleventh-century codex written in Italy, now Oxford, Bodleian Library, Additional C. 144 (= O). O had already attracted scholarly attention, for it transmits several grammatical texts; and M. De Nonno, in 1990, identified one of them as the previously unknown Institutio de arte metrica of Martianus Capella. D.’s contention is that the MS also transmits an ancient school text, a set of private notes by a teacher possibly based in North Africa and active in the fifth century (pp. 28–30). These private notes were intended to support teaching in a class of future stenographers, notarii. D. argues that these notes were in essence a commentary on an early and slightly outdated version of what has come down to us as the Commentarii Notarum Tironianarum (CNT, edited by G. Schmitz in 1893), a vast collection of stenographic signs (about 13,000 according to D.) followed by their ‘translations’ as Latin words. Among the 1,800 entries included in EN D. was able to identify coincidences with 1,100 entries of CNT: the number is significant, and the connection is demonstrated with telling and to me fully convincing examples. The Latin wordlist thus extracted from CNT was supplemented with ‘explanations’ of a different nature, semantic, but also grammatical, legal, historical and literary. In D.’s view study of EN sheds light on the formalised training of notarii, for which she surveys the limited evidence available, canvassing the view that such training started at a very young age (pp. 19–22).
In D.’s reconstruction O, though relatively late in date, is the most important and complete witness of EN. Her edition, however, is also based on EN-clusters identified in a number of medieval glossaries ranging in time from the seventh to the tenth centuries. Many entries in her book are therefore familiar to students of Latin language and glossaries, who usually encounter these or some variants of these while consulting the Thesaurus glossarum Latinarum (vols 6 and 7 of the Corpus glossariorum Latinorum) or looking up words in TLL. D.’s reconstruction of EN traces back many such glosses to a common late-antique origin, and it goes a long way towards reconstructing the intellectual context and the original form in which they were first elaborated.
EN is divided in O in 23 sections, which D. identifies by letters and numbers of individual entries (from A.1 to X.9, the lemma is highlighted in bold type) for ease of reference. Entries are not ordered alphabetically but they are grouped in thematic clusters, with sub-sequences sometimes motivated by the intention of differentiating near-homographs or (hypothetically) by similarities in the stenographic symbols that were the raison d’être of the initial wordlist.
The consensus of O entries with glossary traditions already established at a very early date in the Middle Ages (namely the Anglo-Saxon glossaries, AEC, but also Abstrusa and Sg) is the strongest indirect clue to the great antiquity of the text edited (pp. 48–63). O is the most complete witness in this stemma, and the genuineness of its EN material is vouchsafed by either consensus with some or all of the other glossaries or coincidence with CNT. When such control is not available, unless I am missing something, there is no guarantee that O is immune from later additions and interpolations seeping into the text except on the intrinsic merits of the text. In at least one case (Q.31 psithacus ) D. is sceptical, when the entry is written in the margin.
D.’s book is a milestone in the study of Latin glossary traditions and ancient Latin lexicography, and it significantly advances the knowledge of the history of the Latin lexicon. The connection with CNT is clinching and, for me, final (pp. 11–14), but what is possibly the most important contribution of the book is that it lays bare such an important channel in the transmission of the Latin vocabulary to the Middle Ages and places the origins of a vast amount of medieval Latin glosses at the end of antiquity.
We encounter new Latin words or loanwords (e.g. V.21 epepirrema superaduerbium, perhaps grammatical jargon for that notorious ‘Vulgar Latin’ class, ‘compound adverbs’ or prepositions, e.g. abintus, deretro, delonge, on which see J. Adams, Social Variation [2013], pp. 582–612), and EN reinforces the linguistic credentials of other terms already known from glossaries containing EN material but considered of doubtful authority (J.128 proscariose ; N.71 hastarium ; N.76 acisculum ). Other terms are suggested by D. to be fictional combinations originating in stenographic practice. Some of the new terms provide foundations for later Romance evolutions with no previous direct evidence (S.21 acereum; G.145 femella ; O.36, saltus mons a saliendo), others are variants of super-rare terminology (J.110 ramuscularius as the name of a tax-collector, ramularii in ‘Philoxenus’; S.71) or loanwords (C.12 melopoeos quasi carminis factor, unde ποιε<ι> ‘facit’ dicunt Graeci).
A study that contains so much that is new is bound to spawn much further discussion in the field and arouse several questions. Not all the entries of EN seem to me compatible with the expected level of competence of even private notes of an early fifth-century African teacher (and perhaps the geographical context is determined with a degree of overconfidence). Grasp of Greek sometimes seems vague or by hearsay, oddly for such an early date (cf. I.12 εταρχαι multorum annorum reges; K.87 graece maior ‘megas’ dicitur; P.79 lectulus graece ‘clinos’ dicitur; I.47 planetum a plano, unless from an original πλανω misunderstood as Latin; N.155 a regione oros dictus, possibly for ὅρος, but it means ‘boundary’; V.27 hironia, ‘often spelt with an initial h in L(ate) L(atin)’ or in the manuscripts transmitting some LL works?). Some of the entries are compatible with an epitomised version, in which perfectly clear explanations became too compact to be comprehensible: for example, I.28 riualis unius riui amor looks like a shortened version of the annotation of a Terence text (cf. Eugraphius on Ter. Eun. 268 riuales … quasi uno riuo amoris utantur). Perhaps the archetype of O and the other glossaries (p. 72) was not very far in date from or identical with that epitome? D. often describes entries as ‘collapsed’, ‘telescoped’ versions: other such cases seem to me to be A.48; B.20; J.1117; L.18 ( oppansum uelum in scaena quod undique pandatur, ‘a curtain on a stage, which is spread on all sides’, clear, but seeming to miss something; T.5; T.18). D. sometimes refrains from emending even obvious non-existent terms for which she has found a solution (U.8 hianio , rightly seen to stand for hic unio, ‘pearl’; K.108 Iouis Iunoni non Ioui Iunoni, for Iugi Iunoni), giving the impression that she aims at reconstruction of that later epitome. Entries like A.35 hosce hos est, sed Romani inuenerunt syllabam ce also suggest distance (similar at F.56; G.133). Nothing definite about a date emerges from the study of the glossator’s language (pp. 31–4, 371–83), but we encounter cases of ipse = idem, ‘identical with’ (M.60: cf. LHS, 189–90), minus a as ‘less than’, for describing a diminutive, uetulus (I.84; for a, ab with a comparative cf. LHS 186) and, perhaps more crucially, instances where ipse is a demonstrative, or the article, ‘the place in which’, not ‘the very place in which’ (G.46 Parentalia ipsi sunt dies festi paganorum; S.56 frutectum ipse locus ubi ponuntur, sc. the frutices, ‘shrubs’; cf. LHS 190). While none of these features is unparalleled in Late Latin, the use of ipse as a demonstrative sits uneasily in a school context.
Finally, I offer a few suggestions for textually problematic entries: N.104 naupactus officium est nauis, corrupt for either naupagium (the ‘art of building or mending ships’) or naupegus, the ‘shipwright’; F.45 fascinus aspectus onerosus, perhaps for ominosus?; B.4 ‘pote’ et ‘non pote’ … dicunt rustici (D.: husci O; tusci cett.): perhaps Osci?; P.82 paegnium locus lusorius, why not simply iocus, lusorius? lusorium is in Seneca with the meaning ‘joke, pleasantry’.
