About
Purpose
Gallery of Glosses is a project that aims to make glosses on authoritative texts more accessible to scholars. Hundreds of thousands of glosses appear in medieval and other manuscripts. Many of these glosses remain hidden away in manuscripts in remote places or, even if they exist in digitized manuscripts, remain difficult to read or difficult to find. This site publishes glosses that scholars have transcribed and provides some essential data related to each gloss, including the textual witness(es) or manuscript(s) where it was found, what work it is glossing, and what language it is in.
Studying Glosses
Medievalists of all disciplines frequently come across glosses in copies of works they are studying; Gallery of Glosses aims to facilitate research on the glosses themselves. These glosses testify to the vibrant and also sometimes mundane reading and studying of authoritative texts in medieval communities and by individuals. In many cases, the authors of the glosses remain anonymous; in other cases, they are figures of import whose work became authoritative in their own right. In both cases, these glosses constitute evidence of knowledge creation and transmission, modes of thought, and hermeneutical trends.
Extent
Gallery of Glosses is not limited to genre, language, or time period. The intention is to see the glosses available to researchers grow to include hundreds of glosses on authoritative philosophical texts (e.g., Aristotle’s De anima), theological texts (e.g., Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae), scriptural texts (e.g., the Epistle to the Romans), legal texts (e.g., Justinian’s Codex), literary texts (e.g., Beowulf), and more.
Gallery Website
This website is the public collection of the Gallery of Glosses data, managed at glossing.rerum.io. That site is where scholars can go if they want to contribute glosses to Gallery of Glosses. A user account is required to work in the data-management platform wing of Gallery of Glosses; this public site is open and available for browsing to anyone.
The Team
Gallery of Glosses is a team project at Saint Louis University. The Principal Investigator of Gallery of Glosses is Atria A. Larson, PhD. Senior personnel performing the software development work are Patrick M. Cuba and Bryan Haberberger of the university’s Research Computing Group.