While quill and ink were the writing implements of choice in the Anglo-Saxon scriptorium, other colouring and non-colouring writing implements were in active use, too. The stylus, among them, was used on an everyday basis both for taking notes in wax tablets and for several vital steps in the creation of manuscripts. Occasionally, the stylus or perhaps even small knives were used for writing short notes that were scratched in the parchment surface without ink. One particular type of such notes encountered in manuscripts are dry-point glosses, i.e. short explanatory remarks that provide a translation or a clue for a lexical or syntactic difficulty of the Latin text. The present study provides a comprehensive overview of the known corpus of dry-point glosses in Old English by cataloguing the 34 manuscripts that are currently known to contain such glosses. A first general descriptive analysis of the corpus of Old English dry-point glosses is provided and their difficult visual appearance is discussed with respect to the theoretical and practical implications for their future study.

Essays about the creation, circulation, and collection of medieval manuscripts. The essays collected here celebrate the work of Barbara Shailor, the distinguished scholar of medieval manuscripts. They explore various aspects of their provenance. The subjects addressed range from studies of the history of individual manuscripts, to the evidence afforded by the understanding of their textual traditions, to the significance of the identification of fragments, to the roles of individual scholars and collectors. As a whole the volume contributes to a wider understanding of how the history and ownership of medieval manuscripts can be fruitfully examined, a flourishing area of interest in the field.

First published in 1998, the present volume aims to help the researcher locate visual motifs, whether in medieval art or in literature, and to understand how they function in yet other medieval literary or artistic works.