3 Review(s)

Prior to his 1890 publication of the Corpus Christi Latin-Old English MS, also reissued in this series, Jan Hendrik Hessels (1836-1926) had begun transcribing this equally important text, of which his edition was published in 1906. (He explains the delay by referring to 'work of another nature': his monumental edition of the archive of the Dutch Church in London (1887-1897), also now available in the Cambridge Library Collection.) Hessels again provides a thorough introduction, including a detailed physical description of the manuscript alongside its history, provenance, and a wealth of other information. The work contains extracts from various texts and treatises, and Hessels' cross-references to other glossaries demonstrate the importance of the Leiden MS for gloss-literature, and will be of use to philologists, scholars of Old English and medieval Latin, and historians of the medieval period.