Collecting Encyclopaedic Knowledge in England and on the Continent: the Vocabularius Sancti Galli’

The eighth-century St Gall, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 913 is a remarkable manuscript. Written in Anglo-Saxon majuscules on 101 folia that measure only c. 9 cm. × 8.7 cm, it consists of three codicological units, the last of which contains the glossary known as Vocabularius Sancti Galli, from which the manuscript derives its name. The two former codicological units contain miscellanies with a strong representation of encyclopaedic material. Classified as a diarium or scrapbook of a travelling cleric, the collection has, so far, been regarded as largely unordered. In this contribution I argue that the scribe’s principles of collectio may be better understood if the miscellanies in the two former codicological units are analysed individually as collections of encyclopaedic material which interlink with the longer texts at the beginning of each unit: Jerome’s Epistula LIII to Paulinus of Nola and a series of questions and answers known as the Ioca monachorum respectively. A review of the subsequent material in each codicological unit suggests that the scribe collected encyclopaedic texts and excerpts with the longer, major texts as frames of reference, while drawing from a wide variety of encyclopaedic, computistical, and glossographical learning, as evidenced by Continental and Insular sources and analogues.