Dictionary of Medieval Latin completed!

Fig. 1. Inscription from the Great East Window at York Minster, from the panel depicting the Angels with the Winds and the Seal (Revelation VII, 1-3): ‘: Nolite : / : nocere : / terre : mari : nec : arb/[o]ribus :’ (‘Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees’).

The British Academy has published the final part of its monumental Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, which contains more than 58,000 entries in nearly 4,000 pages. The dictionary, the most comprehensive study ever produced of Latin in medieval Britain, has been completed a century after the project began.

Over 200 researchers have worked on the project, and the dictionary is based entirely on original and systematic research of a massive array of British Latin material, including poetry, sermons, chronicles, scientific texts, legal documents, state records, accounts and letters. The dictionary covers the vocabulary of the Latin language used in Britain and by Britons between AD 540 and 1600. It spans 15 volumes, the first of which came out in 1975. The project’s history will be narrated in a display in the Bodleian Library, Oxford until 16 February 2014.

For more information see the website.