A medieval Sicilian word-list, edited in Palermo

Angelo Senisio’s Declarus belongs to the medieval tradition of word-books in which Latin, the language of learning, meets Sicilian, the everyday speech of the island. In 1955 Augusto Marinoni took out the Sicilian words and published them on their own, so that they could be studied for what they are: evidence of how Sicilian vocabulary developed, and of how it sat beside the learned Latin culture of its time.

The book was issued in Palermo by the Centro di Studi Filologici e Linguistici Siciliani as the sixth volume of its collection of Sicilian texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a series directed by Ettore Li Gotti. It is a modern scholarly edition of far older material, not a manuscript, and for anyone curious about Sicilian, about Italian dialects or about how dictionaries were made, it opens onto a language as it was written down in the late Middle Ages.

This copy keeps its original pale green-grey printed wrappers, rubbed along the edges and spine, a little discoloured and creased at the corners, and its numbered series leaf. The leaves seen in photographs are clean; the contents have not been collated.