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

注解是中世纪早期西方拉丁文手稿中普遍存在的边缘和线间音符，曾经是主流思想史的技术杂耍。传统上，注释学的研究重点是对白话词语的阐释。我的项目与19世纪这一领域研究的主要语言学焦点形成了鲜明对比。作为对注释的第一次广泛研究，它试图调查关键文本和作者的注释，以便在中世纪早期知识是什么以及它是如何制作的概念框架中观察注释。拟议项目的目的之一是研究在对中世纪文化史至关重要的时期，注解如何帮助塑造古典和犹太教-基督教学术的传承。因此，了解注释可以让我们欣赏我们的知识遗产。另一个目的是调查注释，以洞察中世纪早期书籍文化中知识的制作。在现代世界，我们高度重视知识的快速和容易获得，但这项研究将提出一个完全不同的理想：知识是经过艰苦的汇编和努力构建的，甚至有时是通过解开那些已经变得晦涩难懂、用训诫困难进行编码或以权威来源为参考的知识。因此，这项研究不仅在智力上，而且在教育上也很重要。它表明，中世纪的注解对现代解释实践的理解构成了一个问题。它认为，通过研究它们，我们可以开始理解它们对早期中世纪学术社区的价值。最重要的是，这个项目将调查注解对主流思想史的意义。例如，它研究注解如何帮助解决为什么中世纪基督教学者阅读古典异教著作的问题，并着眼于注解揭示了中世纪早期的阅读实践。此外，这个项目的一个核心问题是重新思考中世纪早期注释剂的功能。在广泛的手稿研究的基础上，该项目试图辩称，现代意义上的澄清并不是中世纪早期注释者的唯一意图，有时甚至根本不是意图。注释者还增加了含义的层次，引入了复杂性，并对一个或多个单词提供了多种解释。因此，他们引入了意义的多义性，并强调了文本中潜在的歧义。Glossers甚至创造了一种神秘感。当然，我们只能推断他们的意图，但注释者确实加密和隐藏信息，参与文字游戏和创造谜题，以及使可能难以理解的东西更容易理解--因此，他们经常传达知识的复杂性和模糊性--也就是说，在知识可能被理解之前需要主动解码。本研究将通过仔细阅读注解手稿来论证，对知识进行编码是一个过程，是一种至关重要的认识论动态，而不是一种特定的知识。它处于中世纪解释学的核心，并与旨在解开意义以及持续和缓慢的智力参与的成熟的解释、解释和认知实践相一致。这项研究有可能接触到对中世纪思想史和思想史感兴趣的更广泛的受众，并将吸引那些对中世纪和现代背景下的蒙昧和密码分析感兴趣的人。

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.