Expositio Notarum ed. by A. C. Dionisotti (review)

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• Expositio Notarum ed. by A. C. Dionisotti
• Scott G. Bruce

Expositio Notarum Edited by A. C. Dionisotti Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries 64. Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. 642. ISBN 9781316514795

This book begins with a manuscript that presents a mystery. Oxford, Bodleian Library, Add. C.144 is a miscellany of late antique and early medieval grammatical and metrical treatises, a "mass Latinsalvaging project" (71) produced in central Italy in the eleventh century. On folios 114v to 132r, the scribe has copied a peculiar collection of Latin glosses entitled Expositio Notarum (EN). It comprises a series of around 1800 Latin keywords (lemmata) with explanations of their meaning ranging from single-word synonyms to discursive comments on their etymology and morphology. Most early medieval glossaries identify their textual sources or give them away by following the alphabetical or grammatical order of the text they are glossing, but this one is elusive. Taken together, the Latin keywords of the EN do not derive from any known literary or historical text from Roman antiquity. [End Page 292]

In the introduction to this study, we follow Dionisotti as she unravels the mystery of the source of this enigmatic collection of Latin glosses. The title of the work provides a valuable clue that the glossary is an explication of "notes" (notae), but what kind of notes? While chasing down some of the more unusual Latin terms (for example, plausile, intolerat, and disdonat), instruments of reference led Dionisotti time and again to the only other early medieval source that preserved the same rare words: the Commentarii Notarum Tironianarum (CNT), a dictionary of about 13,000 symbols of Roman shorthand (that is, Tironian notes) with their Latin equivalents. According to Isidore of Seville, Cicero's freedman scribe M. Tullius Tiro devised this system to facilitate the rapid transcription of oral information. Later generations of scribes expanded the list with new symbols. There is evidence for the use of Tironian notes throughout Late Antiquity in pagan and Christian contexts. The system retained its currency in the early Middle Ages; sixteen manuscripts of the CNT survive from the Carolingian period. As Dionisotti argues, the EN is a series of glosses on the meaning of Latin terms found in a handbook of Tironian notes similar to the Carolingian exemplar of the CNT (but likely predating it), with which it shares around 1,100 lemmata in common (about 61% of its contents).

With this mystery solved, Dionisotti spends the rest of the introduction explaining the context and character of the EN. Unlike the CMT, which may have been produced as early as the second century but grew over time as it incorporated elements that dated from the early Middle Ages, including Christian terminology, the EN seems to be a gloss on a "thoroughly classical" set of vocabulary that "reflects the Republic and the early, but not later, Empire" (18). As Dionisotti notes, "the Ciceronian backdrop to the whole is unmistakable" (23). Its companion text was most likely a Roman manual for Latin shorthand that would later inform the CNT. Internal evidence suggests that the EN itself was compiled in the first decades of the fifth century by a teacher living in North Africa and working in a secular context, one of the thousands who taught students shorthand to prepare them for positions as notarii in the Roman imperial administration. Like its lost companion, the EN comprises a list of Latin words organized by morphological similiarity or, more seldomly, by topics like family relations, political offices, and agriculture. While the EN survives in only a single manuscript from the eleventh century, Dionisotti demonstrates that many alphabetized Latin glossaries from the early Middle Ages borrowed substantial portions of the content from it. She devotes almost half of the introduction to generous examples of these borrowings (40–71).

The meat of the volume (79–369) is Dionisotti's edition of the Latin lemmata in the EN with their definitions, as well as cross-references to examples of the words in question in CNT and other early Latin glossaries. She also supplies editorial commentary on the meaning and forms of the words themselves. While highly technical, this material...