Thirty years ago, when I first attempted to describe the characteristic features of tenth-century Anglo-Latin literature, I was rather naively bedazzled by the display of vocabulary which one encounters there. Because much of the vocabulary appeared to derive either from Aldhelm or from glossaries of the type called "hermeneumata", I followed scholarly tradition and described the style as "hermeneutic", on the assumption that the principal impulse behind the verbal display was that of dazzling the reader with arcane vocabulary exhumed from Greek-Latin glossaries and authors such as Aldhelm. I now suspect that the perception needs modification: that the authors' principal aim was not obfuscation, but was their (misguided, perhaps) attempt to reach in their prose a high stylistic register.[40]