“The Wissembourg Priscian Glosses” provides a digital edition and an interpretation of the roughly 2.000 Latin and 150 Old High German glosses on the first sixteen books of Priscian’s Ars Grammatica contained in the manuscript Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 50 Weissenburg. The edition is a work in progress and will be completed until 2025.
Dealing with this manuscript, modern scholars have focused on its Old High German glosses by publishing and studying in detail all those detected so far. Conversely, the vast majority of the Latin annotations still needs to be investigated. As a further result, it has been demonstrated that the teacher and exegete Otfrid of Wissembourg (d. after 871) wrote a considerable, though not exactly specified, number of these glosses, both in Latin and in the vernacular.
This digital edition aims to publish for the first time the entire corpus of the glosses contained in the manuscript, to distinguish the scribes who wrote them, to classify their contents and functions, and finally to trace their sources. The edition will enrich our knowledge about the reception of Priscian’s grammar in Carolingian Europe and provide evidence for future investigations on the interplay between Latin and Old High German in ninth-century teaching practices. “The Wissembourg Priscian Glosses” is an output of the research project "Margins at the Centre", which aims to explore how Latin and the Bible were studied in Carolingian East Francia.
