Crafting knowledge in the early medieval West: Glosses, learning and culture, circa 800-1050

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Glosses, that is marginal and interlinear notes ubiquitous in Latin manuscripts of the early medieval West, were once side-lined as a technical sideshow to mainstream intellectual history. Traditionally, scholarship on glosses focused on the exposition of words in the vernacular. My project contrasts with the essentially linguistic focus of nineteenth-century research in this area. As the first wide-ranging study of glosses, it seeks to investigate annotations on key texts and authors in order to view glosses in the conceptual framework of what knowledge is and how it is made in the early Middle Ages. One of the aims of the proposed project is to examine how glosses helped shape the inheritance of classical and Judaeo-Christian learning during a period crucial for the cultural history of the Middle Ages. Understanding glosses thus allows us to appreciate our intellectual heritage. Another aim is to investigate glosses for insight into the crafting of knowledge in early medieval book culture. In the modern world we put high value on knowledge quickly and easily acquired, but this study will present a quite different ideal: of knowledge that is painstakingly compiled, constructed through effort and even, at times, attained through the unravelling of that which has been rendered obscure, encoded with exegetical difficulty or clothed in references to authoritative sources. This research is thus not only intellectually but also educationally important. It shows that medieval glosses pose a problem for the modern understanding of interpretative practices. It argues that by studying them we can begin to comprehend what value they held for early medieval scholarly communities. Above all, this project will investigate the significance of glosses for mainstream intellectual history. For example, it studies how glosses help resolve the question of why classical pagan works were read by medieval Christian scholars and looks at what glosses reveal about early medieval reading practices. Moreover, a central concern of this project is to rethink the function of early medieval glosses. On the basis of extensive manuscript research, the project seeks to argue that clarification in the modern sense was not the sole and sometimes not at all the intention of early medieval glossators. Glossators also added layers of signification, introduced complexity, and offered multiple interpretations of a word or words. As such, they introduced both polysemy of meaning and underscored potential ambiguity in the text. Glossators even created a sense of mystery. We can of course only infer their intentions, but glossators did in fact encrypt and conceal information, engage in word play and create puzzles, as well as make what was likely difficult easier to understand - hence they often communicated the complexity and obscurity of knowledge - that is, the need for active decoding before it may be understood. This research will argue from close readings of glossed manuscripts that encoding knowledge was a process, a crucial epistemological dynamic rather than a particular kind of knowledge. It was at the core of medieval hermeneutics and in line with well-established interpretative, exegetical and cognitive practices aimed at the unravelling of meaning, and at sustained and slow intellectual engagement. The research has the potential to reach out to a wider audience interested in medieval intellectual history and the history of ideas and will appeal to those interested in obscurantism and cryptanalysis in both its medieval and modern contexts.