Leyden Manuscript

The Leyden manuscript is the name usually given in Breton studies to a four-page leaflet kept in Leiden University Libraries in the Netherlands. It is a fragment of a Latin medical treatise supposedly dating from the late 8th or 9th century in which two Irish words appear and about thirty Old Breton words.

Language and origin

Pierre-Yves Lambert thus describes the place held by Breton in this text :

Vossianus lat. 96 A has the peculiarity of including Old Breton not in the glosses, but in the main text: it is one of the few documents where the vernacular language is not restricted to secondary use. Nevertheless, Old Breton only intervenes on one page of this bifolio and there it remains subordinate to Latin insofar as it is simply technical words which are substituted for the corresponding Latin words.

From a literary point of view, Lambert adds:

Leiden's medical fragment is doubtless not typically Breton in the subject: it is a question of ancient or medieval Latin recipes that are constantly being copied in monasteries.

Professor emeritus Hervé Le Bihan from the Breton-Celtic department of Rennes 2 University noted that the origin and date are problably Cornish and the first half of the 10th century, respectively, although the words are closer to Breton.
Heather Stuart found similar or identical manuscript texts, the Laon manuscript Laon 426 folio 117-119, and Amiens ms. Escalopier 2, folio I-XII.

Breton words found

Some examples of the Breton words found in the manuscript:

Literature

This article contains a transcription of the manuscript followed by a glossary.