Library › Latin: Grammar & Reference › Rapularius
The Rapularius (‘notebook’) of Heinrich Toke, doctor of theology and canon of Magdeburg, a large alphabetical collection of notes that, as the heading says, he carried with him wherever he went and added to daily as things worth remembering occurred to him. The heading calls it a collection ‘like God, without beginning and knowing no end’. Entries under headwords such as Abbas, Abba pater and Adolescentula gather canon law references, biblical exegesis from Nicholas of Lyra, patristic quotations and notes on books, such as where the works of Pseudo-Dionysius with their glosses could be found in Paris.
Toke, who died in the mid-1450s, was a leading churchman of fifteenth-century Saxony, active at the Council of Basel and in the controversy over the bleeding hosts of Wilsnack. His notebook, edited by Hildegard Hölzel-Ruggiu for the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, offers a direct view of the working library and intellectual habits of a late medieval university theologian. At about 65,000 words it is a substantial reference text.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from the digital Monumenta Germaniae Historica of the MGH and the Bavarian State Library, Munich (edition: Hölzel-Ruggiu, Hildegard, Hahn, Hannover 2002), through Corpus Corporum (University of Zurich). The MGH and the Bavarian State Library claim no rights in the text itself; their annotations are licensed CC BY 4.0. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.