Haec quicumque legis. A ten Century Etymological Lexicon

Ademar of Chabannes collected in his notebooks, MS Leiden, Vossianus latinus octavo 15, different kinds of educational material.

One of the texts in this practice-oriented set is a lexicon with the incipit Haec quicumque legis, a wordlist that, except in VLO 15, has left no traces in manuscript tradition, that is, neither Ademar’s model nor any later copies have been preserved.

We can often trace the origin of the information in this lexicon, namely as a commentary on the works of Priscianus, Persius, Juvenalis, Prudentius, Sedulius, etc. Information that may be derived from marginal glosses or from glossae collectae to the works of these authors. However, the word explanations do not follow the order of e.g. Priscian’s Ars grammatica, which means that this lexicon cannot have been intended to be used as an explanation of the Ars grammatica itself. We sometimes discern a regrouping in thematically related glosses and in this respect, together with the programmatic introduction, the glossary has an encyclopaedic and autonomous character, intended not so much as a commentary to clarify a particular text but in the first place serving as a repository of knowledge —mostly etymological— from which could be drawn at will.

There are clues in this text and in the surrounding texts in VLO 15 that make it plausible that Haec quicumque legis has roots in the monastery of St-Emmeram in Regensburg and from there further back to the monastery of St-Maximin in Trier, a place where the Eastern and Western commentary tradition met each other. The man who embodied the connection between East and West was Ramwold, born in 900, monk of St-Maximin until 975 and abbot of St.-Emmeram from that year until 1001. Possibly Haec quicumque legis originated in this environment to meet the need for education in St-Emmeram, before this text migrated to Limoges.