Christopher J. McDonough's edition of Alexander Neckam's Sacerdos ad altare admirably upholds the high standards of the CCCM series, and joins Hochgürtel's edition of Neckam's Suppletio defectuum and his smaller poems, published in the same series in 2008.
The text survives without attribution or title in only one manuscript, written in the thirteenth century and now in Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, ms. 385/ 605. It consists of twenty chapters about topics ranging from the Church offices to the royal court to geometry, each of which is followed in the manuscript by a commentary in the form of glosses on various words from the chapter. The attribution of this text to Alexander Neckam (1147- 1217) was the work of Charles Homer Haskins and Richard Hunt, undertaken in the first part of the twentieth century,[1] but McDonough identifies a number of cross-references within this gloss which indicate that it was planned and intended as an independent work complementary to the main text (XX), although it may have originated as marginal glosses (XXXIX), and significantly, he also adduces evidence to confirm that Neckam composed the gloss as well as being the author of the main text (X-XI). Neckam taught at the school in St Albans and later at Oxford, and was made abbot of Cirencester in 1213. He died four years later in 1217, at Kempsey. Sacerdos seems to have been written some time in the second decade of the thirteenth century, and thus in this last phase of his life (IX-X).
McDonough's edition is the first to print in full both the main text of the Sacerdos and its gloss: previous editions printed either the text or gloss (or both) only in part.[2] The edited Latin text is meticulously presented, and is clear and easy to follow. The gloss is extremely abbreviated in the manuscript and has been silently expanded throughout, which is useful in providing a very readable text. There is a full and clear critical apparatus, and indices of Scriptural citations, the works of other authors and of Neckam himself, and of the French words which are used throughout the text.
In this edition, McDonough presents both the main text and the gloss in the order in which they appear in the manuscript, and this is helpful in considering the two as related works of more or less equal importance. The lemmata in the gloss are highlighted by the use of small caps, but it might have been helpful to present the text of the gloss and the main text of the Sacerdos in a way which distinguished them still further, perhaps by printing them in different sizes. This would have had the added advantage of replicating to some extent the apparent effort made by the scribe to distinguish between the two (see XXXV).
McDonough's account of the mammoth task faced in producing a readable edition of Neckam's text from the one surviving witness makes for interesting reading. The manuscript contains numerous errors, many attributable to the scribe, but McDonough notes that it is not always possible to tell whether the error may originate from Neckam's hand rather than the scribe's (XLI). Sometimes recourse has had to be made to comparable or borrowed passages of Neckam's sources, either his own works or those of authors, to try to determine what Neckam may have intended to write, since corruption and lacunae have left the text incomprehensible in some places in the manuscript. But Neckam's own practice was to adjust as he wrote, and his sources are not always in accordance with modern readings, leaving McDonough to conclude that "this analogical procedure can do no more than provide a rough guide to what Neckam probably wrote." Nonetheless, the care and attention to detail with which this task has been undertaken is evident throughout.
The introduction to the text is instructive and useful, although a little more information about the relative chronology of Neckam's works, however abbreviated, would have been a welcome inclusion. McDonough provides a brief summary of Neckam's life and discusses some of the relationships between his other works and the Sacerdos, mostly in the context of establishing Neckam's authorship (X-XV). He also explores the close relationship between the text and its commentary, such as the way that the vocabulary of the main text, some of it rare, allows for extended discussion in the gloss and thus for material suitable for a range of different levels of students (XIX). McDonough devotes considerable attention to the sources of the text and especially to those of the gloss, and to the way in which Neckam used, adapted and treated these sources, such as his tendency to mention an earlier author's work (especially Isidore's Origenes) only to contradict it. Here some of the more extended examples in overly long footnotes might usefully have been placed in an appendix instead (see for example XXX-XXI). It would also have been interesting to see a slightly more detailed discussion of some of the peculiar vocabulary which is a feature of both text and gloss, although this may await future research.
McDonough's discussion of the manuscript is careful, but it is surprisingly short (XXXV-XXXVI): the reader is referred elsewhere for information about the full contents of the manuscript. There is nothing here to indicate what else was copied along with the Sacerdos, and thus how the only surviving copy of the work might have been used, even if not by Neckam himself. It is also a pity that it was not possible to provide an image of the manuscript, since this would have been helpful in conceptualizing the form of the text and commentary as reproduced on the page: again the reader is referred elsewhere. More information about aspects of the manuscript such as the hands and possible context of use would have expanded the perspective on the text, which is very Neckam-focused: while this is understandable, Neckam's production of the text is clearly not its only context or intellectual milieu, and since the author is not named in the manuscript it may be assumed that the text's thirteenth-century users were less concerned about Neckam than is the modern scholar.
Throughout both the introduction and the edition proper McDonough's very high standard of scholarship is apparent, but there are places in the introduction where greater clarity of expression would have been desirable. Some passages are rather difficult to follow, for example on p. XV, where "former" and "latter" refer first to text and gloss, and immediately afterwards to two of Neckam's works, De nominibus utensilium and Corrogationes Promethei.[3] This is hardly impenetrable but the reader does find her/himself re-reading on occasion throughout the introduction to ensure that the editor's meaning has been understood correctly, and this could perhaps have been avoided. Likewise there are occasional peculiarities which could have been edited out, such as the reference in the main text of p. XXXVII to A. B. Hunt, although he appears in the bibliography under "Hunt, T" for Tony rather than "Hunt, A" for Anthony.[4] There is also a slightly odd tendency to refer to the author of Sacerdos ad altare both as Neckam and as Alexander, sometimes in consecutive sentences, but also even in the same sentence where perhaps a pronoun might have been used instead (e.g. "The strong implication of Alexander's authorship and the date of the Sacerdos allow the previously documented material from Neckam's writings present in the work to be viewed in a new light.", XII).
Ultimately though this does not detract from what is a very fine edition, which will allow fresh study of this interesting, if idiosyncratic, text. Perhaps if Brepols could be persuaded to lower their prices somewhat the opportunities for studying it would be even greater.
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Notes:
1. See especially C. H. Haskins, "A list of text-books from the close of the twelfth-century," Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 20 (1909), pp. 75-94, and Studies in the history of mediaeval science (Cambridge, MA, 1924), pp. 357ff.; and R. Hunt, Alexander Neckam (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Oxford, 1936).
2. There are partial editions by C. H. Haskins, Studies in the history of mediaeval science, pp. 372-6; H. Kantorowicz, "A Medieval Grammarian on the sources of law," in H. Coing and G. Immel, eds., Rechtshistorische Schriften (Karlsruhe, 1969), pp. 93-110 ; R. W. Hunt, Alexander Neckam, pp. 206-11; T. Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1991, 3 vols) I. 258-73.
3. "In attempting to reconstruct the aims of the Sacerdos, it will be useful for discussion purposes to distinguish the text from the gloss. The nature of the latter broadly aligns it with two of Neckam's earlier works: the wordbook, De nominibus utensilium, and the Corrogationes Promethei, in which he treats semantics, definitions and lexicography. From the former he transferred material relating to the paraphernalia used by professional scribes. From the latter the Sacerdos liberally incorporates notes on the grammar and accentuation of words, quotations from the auctores, and vernacular glosses."
4. Library catalogues and the publisher's website http://www.boydellandbrewer.com/store/viewitem.asp?idproduct=12204 give T. Hunt, although Dr Hunt is listed on the St Peters College as "Dr Anthony B Hunt" http://www.spc.ox.ac.uk/Staff/69/Staff.html?StaffId=49, and as A. B. Hunt in Richard Sharpe's List of Identifications [http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/sharpe/list.pdf, p. 7].