Vocabularium Bruxelense. The Electronic Edition of a Medieval Latin Vocabulary

Iwona Krawczyk, Institute of Polish Language Polish Academy of Sciences
Renaud Alexandre, Institut de Recherche et d'Histoire des Textes CNRS
Krzysztof Nowak, Institute of Polish Language Polish Academy of Sciences

Vocabularium Bruxelense is a name attributed by scholars to a Medieval Latin vocabulary preserved in a
manuscript conserved at the Royal Library of Belgium (Ms. Bruxelles, B.R., II 1049).
This lexicographic compilation dated to the mid-12th century is believed to be the work of an anonymous
Cistercian monk (Weijers 1996).
For centuries the text was only available in handwritten version. The first steps towards publication of the
Vocabularium were made by a Dutch researcher, H.F. Reijnders, who prepared a transcription of the text
and added a draft version of the apparatus. Based on those materials, a group of lexicographers from
France and Poland created a digital edition of the dictionary. After data conversion and XML annotation
of the text, the electronic version of Vocabularium Bruxellense was published in open access through a
TEI Publisher application.
This paper outlines the challenges we faced during the editing work, which involved both data modelling
and manual and semi-automatic XML annotation. We could take inspiration from large electronic editions
such as Liber glossarum (Grondeux & Cinato 2016), but to adequately reflect the complex structure of the
vocabularium, it was necessary to develop our own annotation system.
It was a considerable interpretative effort to determine the boundaries between the parts of the definitions,
which vary in form and may be a few words of description typical of glossaries, or they may contain
extensive etymology, synonyms, encyclopaedic information or numerous quotations to illustrate usage.
Our aim in the XML annotation was to present and highlight individual elements of the original structure
of the entries, but also to include in the edition the rudimentary apparatus prepared by H.F. Reijnders and
completed during the project.

References

Grondeux, Anne and Cinato, Franck. 2016. ‘Liber Glossarum Digital’. http://liber-glossarum.huma-
num.fr.

Weijers, Olga. 1996. ‘Notice Sur Le «Vocabularium Bruxellense»’. *ALMA. Archivum Latinitatis Medii
Aevi*, 233-238, 54.