Claretus And the City: The Glossarius, Its Latin Neologisms and Its Reception in Municipal Administrative Texts

Abstract The influence of Medieval Latin dictionaries on other genres of Medieval Latin literature was limited by two factors: their tendency to preserve ancient hapaxes that appeared nowhere else, and their creativity, resulting in the formation of words no other writer used. A prime example of the latter attitude are the poems written by a 14th-century Czech lexicographer known as Claretus. After a brief outline of the structure of his last and longest versed dictionary, the Glossarius, Claretus’ knack for word-formation is illustrated by several hundred nouns denoting activities, actions, and persons with selected suffixes. Documents created by municipal administration in the 14th and 15th centuries also contain a goodly number of neologisms, even hapax legomena, and verbal overlaps alone are by no means sufficient to prove their authors were acquainted with Claretus’ poems. Nevertheless, I argue that Claretus’ influence is detectable in a handful of administrative texts from medieval Bohemia.