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William Somner's Dictionarium Saxonico William Somner’s Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum: Method, Function and Legacy Rachel Ann Fletcher Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Philosophy in English Language School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow October 2017 © Rachel Fletcher 2017 Abstract William Somner’s Dictionarium Saxonico-Latino-Anglicum was the first published dictionary of Old English, appearing in 1659. This thesis investigates the Dictionarium both as a work in itself and as an important representative of early Old English scholarship. Particular attention is paid to how the content and design of the Dictionarium provide information about the methods used in its compilation, and to how these methods reflect the interests and priorities of Somner and his contemporaries in the study of Old English. However, the Dictionarium was not alone in being shaped by such interests and priorities; in its role as a work of reference, it was also in a position to transmit them to its users through the picture of Old English it presented to them. Accordingly, the thesis considers throughout what impression of Old English the content and design of the Dictionarium might have created for its audience, and how its content and function were influenced by Somner’s understanding and intentions regarding who would use his dictionary and for what purpose. All these factors are considered primarily through their influence on the published Dictionarium, but the thesis also deals briefly with the influence of the Dictionarium after its publication. The methodologies selected to address these questions are varied, aiming to cover as many aspects of the Dictionarium as possible in order to better understand it as a whole. For instance, the use in Chapter 1 of a large sample of entries allows the identification of broad themes in Somner’s lexicography, but subsequent chapters use smaller, more targeted samples and individual entries to highlight features of particular interest and reconstruct the unique process of research that went into Somner’s writing of each definition. Findings from these studies are contextualised by chapters dealing with the Dictionarium’s relationship to other studies of Old English and with the significance of the non-lexical material included in its front and back matter. Thus, this thesis combines various strands of investigation in order to build a picture of how the Dictionarium was shaped by, and was in turn able to shape, the development of Old English scholarship, in which it is a significant milestone. Table of Contents Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 8 SECTION I: CHARACTERISING THE DICTIONARIUM Chapter 1: The character of the Dictionarium – a comparative study ......................... 13 Selection of entries for comparison .................................................................................. 14 Entry counting methodology ............................................................................................ 16 Somner’s cross-referencing and its challenges for entry counting ............................... 16 Entry counting and erroneous forms ............................................................................. 19 Main entries and sub-entries ......................................................................................... 19 Findings ............................................................................................................................ 20 Duplicate entries ........................................................................................................... 21 Proper nouns ................................................................................................................. 22 Poetic vocabulary .......................................................................................................... 24 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 26 Chapter 2: The Dictionarium in context .......................................................................... 27 The influence of earlier lexicography............................................................................... 27 Somner’s use of Nowell ................................................................................................ 28 Somner’s use of D’Ewes............................................................................................... 31 Somner's knowledge of other dictionaries of Old English ........................................... 33 The influence of glossaries ........................................................................................... 34 The impact of the Dictionarium on later scholarship ....................................................... 38 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 41 Chapter 3: Themes in the Dictionarium – case studies ................................................... 42 Fangen and faul: Somner’s use of literary sources .......................................................... 42 Gamol: poetic vocabulary and later users of the Dictionarium ........................................ 43 Somner’s use of external sources in defining poetic vocabulary.................................. 44 Later users ..................................................................................................................... 46 An unplanned application of the Dictionarium?........................................................... 47 Somner and the grammarians ........................................................................................... 48 Law in the Dictionarium .................................................................................................. 50 Contextualising history in the Dictionarium .................................................................... 52 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 55 SECTION II: INVESTIGATING PURPOSE Chapter 4: Audience and purpose .................................................................................... 57 Front and back matter in the Dictionarium ...................................................................... 58 Title page ...................................................................................................................... 58 Dedications ................................................................................................................... 61 Ad Lectorem ................................................................................................................. 63 Poems ........................................................................................................................... 66 Subscribers ................................................................................................................... 73 The Vocabularium Anglo-Saxonicum (1701) .................................................................. 75 A ‘student’s dictionary’? .............................................................................................. 76 ‘Magna vocabulorum vis inobservata’: the Vocabularium’s additions to Somner’s material ......................................................................................................................... 80 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 83 Chapter 5: The Old English canon from a seventeenth-century perspective – a thematic study .................................................................................................................... 85 The Historical Thesaurus and the selection of headwords .............................................. 85 The treatment of literary text types .................................................................................. 87 Compounds with boc ....................................................................................................... 92 The use of Leofric’s donation list .................................................................................... 94 Summary .......................................................................................................................... 96 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 98 Appendix I: Copies of the Dictionarium consulted ....................................................... 101 Appendix II: Dedicatory letter ....................................................................................... 103 Appendix III: The Preface [Ad Lectorem] (Canterbury, Cathedral Archives, CCA- DCc-ChAnt/M/352) .......................................................................................................... 107 Appendix IV: Historical Thesaurus ‘Literature’ entries with a corresponding literary sense recorded in the Dictionarium ................................................................................ 116 Appendix V: boc compounds with a corresponding Dictionarium entry .................... 121 Bibliography ..................................................................................................................... 125 List of Figures Figure 1:
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