The Vocabularius Sancti Galli (St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek MS 913) : diary, travel dictionary, or something else?

St Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek MS 913, pp. 181-202, which consists of Latin lemmata with parallel Old High German glosses, is well known to scholars as one of the most important repositories of Old High German vocabulary. However, there has been much debate about how to characterize its genre and purpose, some viewing it as part of a scholar’s commonplace-book, others proposing that it was meant as a translation aid for an English-speaking missionary working among the Germanic peoples. The present paper investigates the possibility that underlying this collection was a Latin-Old English dictionary originally composed as a vocabulary aid for an Irish scholar at Archbishop Theodore’s Canterbury school.