The word glamour is a ghost of the word grammar. Scottish gramarye shed its bookishness somewhere around the fifteenth century and kept only the uncanny, so that by the time Scott reintroduced it to literary English in 1720 it meant pure enchantment — no conjugations, no parsing, no slate. But the MED tells a less tidy story. Gramarī(e) holds both senses at once: sense 1a is grammar, one of the liberal arts, learning in general; sense 1b is magic, enchantment. Not two words, not even two stages of one word — two senses sitting side by side in the same entry, because medieval usage saw no need to separate them.
The OED’s forms tell you how the word sounded in scribal hands: gram(m)ere, gramayre, gramer, all of them irregular semi-popular adoptions of Latin grammatica through Old French gramaire, which itself meant both learning and incantation. The pleasure of sitting beside a hard text with a grammar and a translation — Procopius or anything else — is the oldest pleasure in the tradition, and grammatica named it. What slipped was not the word but the confidence that deciphering a page of difficult writing was itself a kind of power. A scholar with grammar could unlock what was shut. That the same word could mean the seven liberal arts and a spell cast over the eyes is not a curiosity of etymology but a record of what literacy felt like when it was rare.
Langland’s dreamer falls asleep in a world where ferly and fairy name the same territory — the marvellous thing and the enchantment that produces it — and the whole poem that follows is an act of grammatica in both senses: parsing the world and being spellbound by it.
Yea the illiterate that know not how To cipher what is writ in learned bookes, VVill cote my lothsome trespasse in my lookes.
— Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594)
The word doing the work here is cipher — which in 1594 still carries its Arabic zero, its nothing-that-means-something, alongside its newer sense of decoding. Shakespeare gives the illiterate the same reading power as the learned: they just use a different text. The face instead of the book. What the philologist’s entry captures — literacy as a form of power over locked meaning — Shakespeare inverts: the woman’s body becomes the page that anyone can parse, whether they have grammar or not. Decipherment as violation rather than enchantment. The word gramarye had shed its menace before Lucrece was written, but the menace remained available — it just migrated from the reader’s grammar to the reader’s gaze.
MED cifre n., sense 1(b): “something that has no value in itself, but enhances another’s value.” Usk, Testament of Love: “Although a sypher in augrim have no might in significacion of it-selve, yet he yeveth power in significacion to other.” Shakespeare’s illiterates are the ciphers — zeros that make Lucrece’s body legible. Their nothing is what reads.