Harley MS. 5792 is dated to the eighth century on the British Library website. The codex contains six texts: four Graeco-Latin or Latin lexicographical texts, and two medical texts in Latin.
The first 240 folios contain a Graeco-Latin glossary which was attributed to Cyril of Alexandria, evidently because it was transmitted among some of his works. A comparison of witnesses has shown that the Harley manuscript is the source of other extant copies of the glossary. From the nature of gaps left by the scribe in the Harley text E. Maunde Thompson (who dated the manuscript to the seventh century) argued that the scribe worked from a damaged copy on papyrus (Classical Review 1, 1887, 40).
An edition of pseudo-Cyril’s lexicon appeared at the end of the sixteenth century, in the Thesaurus utriusque linguae of Bonaventura Vulcanius, published in 1600, under the heading ‘Lexicon Graecolatinum vetus in calce quorundam Cyrilli scriptorum inventum’ (coll. 363-666). A new edition, still standard, by G. Götz and G. Gundermann, appeared in Loewe-Götz, Corpus Glossariorum Latinorum, vol. II, 1888.
The British scholar Wallace Martin Lindsay (1858–1937) undertook extensive researches into the details and significance of the medieval glossaries. His works include The Corpus, Epinal, Erfurt and Leyden Glossaries and Ancient Lore in Medieval Latin Glossaries (both 1921), and (with others) Glossaria Latina (1926-1931). A collection of his articles was published in 1996 under the title Studies in Early Medieval Latin Glossaries.
Although austere in their contents, Graeco-Latin and Latin word lists have been of great importance in preserving knowledge of these languages, and they throw important light on reading materials and linguistic usages familiar in scholarly and educational circles in the medieval period.
