Editing early wordlists

A great many dictionaries and wordlists -"glossaries", as medievalists call them, although this word is used in a more restricted sense in later periodssurvive from medieval Europe, and many of them remain unedited.Good editions of primary texts are to be desired in every historical field, but the need for good editions of wordlists is particularly pressing.In early lexicography, the relationships between primary witnesses are complex: where does one lexicographical tradition end, and another, derived from it or akin to it, begin?The story of intertextual relationships which links a wordlist with its non-lexicographical sources is, likewise, often exceedingly intricate.Moreover, the texts of the wordlists, rich in the decontextualized rare words which tend to lead copyists astray, are often very faulty.These are all problems which require editorial work to resolve them.So, readers of early dictionaries owe a particular debt to the editors of the primary sources which they use, especially when the results of their work are as good as A. N. Doane's excellent edition of the so-called "Werden A" wordlist.Such an edition is not only of specialist interest: an edition like Doane's, which treats a text with many connections and many affinities, should speak to many historians of the language sciences in, and beyond, pre-modern Europe.I would like to approach this one with particular attention to the example which it provides for the editing of early wordlists, taking "early" as extending from late antiquity to the middle ages, with a few excursions into the following centuries.I should add that the wordlist which I have just edited is post-medieval, the Table Alphabeticall of Robert Cawdrey (1537-1604?), and that I write as an historian of lexicography with an interest in editing, not as an Anglo-Saxonist.I will begin by sketching two contexts: one for "Werden A", in Anglo-Saxon lexicography, and one for the edition under review, in the editorial tradition of