Faciendi plures libros nullus est finis (Eccl. 12:12)

Of the making of books there might be no end but of the making of dictionaries there sometimes seems to be no proper beginning. I complained to my distinguished doktormutter that there is no proper Latin dictionary for specialists in Medieval philosophy or theology. Her only response was to smile wryly and agree; she pointed out that if I made that claim to an academic conference filled medieval Latin specialists, they would laugh ruefully and welcome me to the club.

There are many general dictionaries that range from useful to excellent. The Oxford Latin Dictionary is very good for what it is, which is a classical dictionary that resolutely excludes everything after 200 AD, thus everything that could possibly be Medieval. Lewis and Short’s A Latin Dictionary is a development of an English translation of a German dictionary, and is rather dated at this stage. However, it has a chronological range that nothing else does, and remains the most useful general text of its kind. There was a brave effort that sprang from the OLD, to fill the post-classical lacuna, Souter’s Glossary of later Latin to 600 A.D. which doesn’t quite hit the mark.

There are also a range of medieval Latin dictionaries that are functional and helpful. Among these we might include Blaise and Neiermeyer. Both are useful generally but philosophically do not have all that much to offer. There are also some philosophical or scholastic dictionaries that are useful but often a bit too specifically Thomistic. One might think of Wuellner’s Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy or Lalande’s Vocabulaire. Not that there’s anything wrong with being Thomistic but there is more to medieval, especially early medieval philosophy than Aquinas. And I say that as an admirer of McInerney’s Thomism of the Strict Observance, even if I cannot claim to be an adherent stricto sensu.

We are thus thrown back on sources like the Vocabulaire Latin Philosophique Médieval or the encyclopaedic Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. One might legitimately feel a certain envy of the scholar of Roman Law with his ready access to Berger’s Dictionary.

This is not all bad, of course. The way to master a dead language is to read and understand it. Dictionaries will only take you part of the way, they are rather like Wittgenstein’s ladder in that way. I found when parsing an 11th Century Latin commentary on one of Boethius’ Opuscula Sacra that the author used the verb “habundo”. This proved, the usual shift in Medieval Latin spelling to be the classical verb “abundo” which means to abound, to be plentiful. The commentator remarked that species, in an Aristotelian taxonomy, abounds over genus. This is obviously false, on any defensible reading of being abundant; genus is a broader and more numerous category, and will have by definition more members than any of its species. It is only when we turn the word over in our minds, and consider what as acute an observer as Gilbert of Poitiers might mean by it that it becomes clear. It refers not to how many instances there are of something but to how fully it exists, and how rich its existence is at an ontological level. So this process of discovery, slow and painstaking as it is, cannot be short-circuited by recourse to a handy single volume or even a bulky, and awkward one. I wonder if, despite the inconvenience, we might not be the better for it?