The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages

This volume brings together a number of papers written by R. W. Hunt (1908-1979) on the history of grammar in the Middle Ages. The importance of these papers lies almost as much in the spark of scholarly investigation that they have inspired, as in their contribution to original research. The first three studies in this collection deal with the change in grammatical doctrine that took place in the late 11th and 12th centuries and from which all subsequent developments during the creative period of medieval grammatical speculation derive. The fourth paper deals with a problem that concerns all students of the medieval liberal arts: the unity of learning, as opposed to the present-day compartmentalisation of studies. The remaining three studies deal with the textual materials available to the medieval student of grammar.