Patrizia Lendinara

The third book of the Bella Parisiacae Urbis by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and its Old English gloss

A certain ‘Descidia Parisiace polis’, which can safely be identified with the work of Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Pres now commonly known as the Bella Parisiacae Urbis , is listed among the books given by AEthelwold to the monastery of Peterborough. We shall never know if AEthelwolds gift corresponds to any of the surviving manuscripts of Abbos poem – though probably it does not – but the inventory gives evidence of the popularity of his work in England. In the following pages I shall consider the genesis and successive fortune of Abbos poem and provide a new assessment of the value of the Bella Parisiacae Urbis . This assessment is a necessary first step to the understanding of the reasons for the success of his poem – and specifically of its third book – in England, as is witnessed by the number of English manuscripts containing the Latin text and by the Old English gloss which was added to this small, intriguing work.

Old Frisian krocha : Setting Fire with a Coal Pan

The Brokmerbref and the Emsigo Compensation Tariff concerning arson provide a number of occurrences of the word krocha , otherwise unrecorded in Old Frisian, in the meaning ‘coal pan’. Yet the Modern Frisian dialect words denote different sorts of cooking pots, either earthen or metal, and apparently do not support the specialized meaning of the Old Frisian. Coal pans were quite common in medieval times, however, and the legal provisions under examination provide both homely and lively descriptions of arson, possibly based on actual cases. Medieval iconography of the devil as an arsonist—portrayed with a coal pan in his hand—assists the interpretation of krocha , which goes back to Richthofen, and adds a further negative tinge to the crime of arson, harshly sanctioned by Old Frisian laws.

The Abbo glossary in London, British Library, Cotton Domitian i

The process through which glossaries came into being can sometimes still be seen and studied in surviving manuscripts, and in such cases it provides a valuable index to the way in which Latin texts were studied in medieval schools. This is the case with an unprinted glossary in London, British Library, Cotton Domitian i. The glossary is mainly made up of words taken from bk III of the Bella Parisiacae urbis by Abbo of Saint-Germain-des-Pres, a work which was widely studied in English schools in the tenth and eleventh centuries, above all because of its unusual vocabulary. We know that Abbo drew the unusual vocabulary in his poem from pre-existing glossaries such as the Liber glossarum and the Scholica graecarum glossarum; but he also took from these works the interlinear glosses which he provided for the difficult words in bk III of his poem, and these in turn are found, with little variation, in all of the manuscripts which preserve the poem. Now under the rubric ‘Incipiunt glossae diversae’ in Cotton Domitian i are collected some two hundred lemmata from bk III of the poem, followed in each case by one or more glosses; on examination these glosses are found to be identical with those which accompany the text in other manuscripts. The glossary in Domitian i thus provides a working model of how a glossary was compiled, and is a further witness to the popularity of Abbos poem in Anglo-Saxon England.