Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 44, Issue 2-3, 2017

This essay aims at giving an account of some pedagogical and syntactical aspects of Francesco da buti’s (1324–1406) Regule grammaticales, a Latin grammar written in Central Italy in the second half of the 14th century. It occupies an important place in the history of positive grammar, providing an excellent example of Latin teaching in late medieval Italy. In fact, da Buti treatise deals not only with grammar, but also with rhetoric and Ars dictaminis, as was customary in the Italian tradition in the final centuries of the Middle Ages. This article analyzes the sections devoted to nouns and verbs, while also pointing out some pedagogical features, such as the exercises of the thèmata and the use of the vernacular as a tool for learning Latin composition.

This essay analyses the most central concepts of Latin syntactical theory in the earliest pedagogical grammars written in Portugal during the 14th and 15th centuries, namely concord, government, and transitivity. The sources include two unpublished treatises preserved in manuscripts of Portuguese origin, one from the end of the 14th century and the other dated 1427, and the first grammar printed in Portugal (1497). They are representative of the teaching of Latin in Portugal at different levels of learning. All three treatises use the vernacular as a pedagogical aid, and Pastrana’s grammar also employs images to illustrate the main syntactical concepts. All treatises discuss government using the regular medieval terminology of regere “to govern” and regi “to be governed”. Like in Spanish, Italian and English grammars of Latin, the three concords belong to the basic syntactical doctrine. The major difference between these textbooks lies in their employment of the concept of transitivity. It is little more than mentioned in the two manuscripts, but highly relevant in the printed grammar.

This article traces the history of Latin parsing grammars from Late Antiquity up to the 14th century, focusing on the group of texts with the incipit Dominus quae pars. These grammars circulating mainly north of the Alps were intended to be studied at the elementary and intermediate levels of education following the study of the Donatus minor. By asking questions about a chosen headword of each part of speech in turn, the parsing manuals offered a technique which allowed the pupil to put into practice what he had already learnt and the teacher to focus on the information he considered as relevant, including different aspects of morphology, semantics, etymology, prosody or accentuation. A number of novelties introduced into the theoretical grammars also filtered down to the lower levels of teaching. Thus, when a section on syntax began to be incorporated into pedagogical grammars in the 12th century, some syntactical concepts also entered into parsing grammars. From the 13th century onwards, elements of Aristotelian logic and physics were also integrated into the theory of the parts of speech and their syntax in the Dominus quae pars texts.

This paper examines the continuities and discontinuities in language teaching between the Middle Ages and the early modern era by drawing attention to the role of bilingual Latin-vernacular proverb collections in premodern education, a subject that has hitherto been neglected in the historiography of linguistics. The focus is on bilingual collections that are of Dutch origin. The paper aims to show that there was an active culture of teaching Latin through vernacular proverbs in Western Europe from the 11th century to the 17th century. After presenting some collections and surveying the arguments in favour of classroom use, it investigates the impact of humanism and the reformation on proverb-based teaching.

William of Champeaux taught the arts of language, grammar, dialectic and rhetoric at the beginning of the 12th century. Abelard who studied with him often quotes and discusses the opinions of “his master”. The different versions of the Glosulae Super Priscianum Maiorem, Glosulae Super Priscianum Minorem and the Notae Dunelmenses, five sets of “notes” on Priscian (three on Priscian major, and two on Priscian minor), to which are added “notes” on Cicero’s De inventione, testify to the grammatical teachings of William and his influence. We first present the arguments that allow us to identify William’s teachings in these texts. Secondly, we expound Williams’ views of the meaning of the noun, verb, substantival verb and the consignifying parts of speech, as well as Abelard’s reactions to his views. These discussions involve a few logico-linguistic problems depending on a quarrel between realism and nominalism.

The teaching of syntax in the 13th-century university was based on the last two books of Priscian of Caesarea’s Institutiones Grammaticae (c.500 A.D.). Following the order proposed by Priscian, the medieval grammarian first studies orthography, which deals with the constituent parts of the word (dictio), then etymology, which is concerned with the word in itself (simpliciter) and its grammatical accidents, and finally diasynthetic or syntax, which discusses the construction of words as constituents of a sentence (oratio). Each of these particular sciences (orthography, etymology and diasynthetic) has its own particular subject, which is, as some philosophers believe, predicated of the subject of the general science according to the aim it purports to achieve. Written probably in the first half of the 1250s in an academic philosophical environment, the Communia super Priscianum minorem, a subsection and the culmination of the Communia super totam gramaticam, are interesting, among other things, in that they specify the epistemological relation that links syntax to the science of grammar in general. In a polemical effort to dismiss the sentence (oratio) as the subject of diasynthetic, the unknown author of the Communia opens the section of syntax with a discussion which aims to establish the “word in relation with another according to their accidental compatibility or incompatibility” as the real subject of syntax, doing so in a typically Aristotelian way.

In the 15th and early 16th centuries, educational life at the universities of Western and Central Europe was dominated by serious doctrinal conflicts between several schools of thought (the Antiqui/Reales vs the Moderni/Nominales), the Wegestreit. This clash not only had serious consequences for instruction in philosophy and theology, but was also felt in the grammar courses of the BA programme. Remarkably, we find the old elementary grammar primer, the Donatus minor, as a prescribed textbook in several Arts faculties. This essay examines the impact of the so-called Wegestreit on university grammar instruction with special reference to late 15th- and early 16th-cent. commentaries on the Donatus minor. After a concise sketch of the philosophical and logical roots of the Wegestreit, I present the development of the conflicting approaches to language and grammar in the 14th century that underlay the divergent opinions of the 15th-century masters.The third section deals with the position of the Donatus minor as a textbook for the undergraduate grammar courses of the Arts faculties. The remainder of this essay falls into two sections. First, a discussion of the different ways the Antiqui and Moderni analyse and explain some theoretical and the related practical aspects of syntactic relations in the last decades of the 15th cent. This part is followed by two case studies of the analyses, explanations and applications of these syntactic phenomena in the commentaries on the Donatus minor of the Realist/Thomist, Magnus Hundt (1449–1519) of Leipzig, and the Modernist Florentius Diel (fl.1490–1509) of Mainz.

In a letter to his friend Joan Serra, Lorenzo Valla (1407–1457) shows his contempt for medieval grammars, describing Alexander de Villa-Dei, Evrard de Béthune, Giovanni Balbi, and others as faex hominum. Many traces of Valla’s polemics against medieval authors are woven into his linguistic works, in primis in his Elegantie lingue latine.

The Elegantie represent a monumental attempt to restore Latin to its original splendour after the so-called barbarities of the Middle Ages. Starting from its structure, this work adopts a completely different form compared with the systematic grammatical syntheses of the previous period. It functions as a series of thematic chapters united in the goal of denouncing earlier grammatical, lexical, syntactic, and interpretive usage and decisions. The chapters are built entirely on an expertly assembled collection of quotations. For Valla, only through consulting the best authors can a scholar reach the latine loqui. In practical terms, however, is Valla truly able to reach this goal and break from the medieval tradition?

Beginning with this question, this paper focuses on Valla’s linguistic works, showing both their innovative and traditional facets. The most significant changes Valla proposes in his linguistic analysis – often presented by the author as a strong attack on medieval grammarians – are illustrated. Also, the paper clarifies the humanist’s inevitable debt to the tradition he scorns, particularly evident when considering his use of grammatical terminology.

The lexicographical part of the Catholicon of Giovanni Balbi of Genoa (d.1286), compiled in 1286, was the dominant Latin dictionary of the 15th century and the first major Latin dictionary to be printed: 24 editions recorded from the 1460s to 1500, another 7 from 1501 to 1520. In the twenty-five years before the final edition, two attempts were made to refurbish it, one by a certain Master Petrus Aegidius in 1499 and one by the humanist Jodocus Badius Ascensius (1462–1535) in 1506. Their editions were meant to maintain the place of a 13th-century dictionary in the world of humanist reference publishing. This paper gives an account of Aegidius’ and Badius’ additions to the Catholicon, emphasising both the intellectual content of their work and the dictionary’s place in the history of the learned book. The paper concludes with an account of how the Catholicon was driven out of the market by a dictionary compiled in the late 15th century, the Dictionarium of Ambrogio Calepino (c.1435–1511), published from 1502 onwards. An appendix sets out the editions of the Catholicon from 1499 onwards, with title page transcriptions.

In 1538 the Flemish humanist language scholar Nicolaus Clenardus (1493–1542) published a grammar of Latin in Braga (Portugal), the Institutiones grammaticae Latinae. The grammar, the fruit of his public teaching in Braga, was the third in a series of grammars written by Clenardus: while active in Louvain (until 1531) he had published grammars of Hebrew (1529) and of Greek (1530). Clenardus’ Latin grammar is basically a didactic grammar, closely linked to his teaching in Portugal, for which he introduced an innovative methodology. It essentially consists of a morphological and syntactic part, followed by a series of mostly syntactic remarks and by a survey of principles of prosody and versification. Clenardus’ exposition is marked by a strong focus on formal markings (lists of nominal and verbal endings), and by the extensive integration of lexical information into the grammatical frame. Clenardus generally refrains from giving definitions of terms and concepts, and theoretical explanations are eschewed in favour of empirical exemplification. The Institutiones grammaticae Latinae provides its users with a large amount of examples, the majority of which stem from colloquial humanist Latin usage, but there are also various examples taken from classical Latin authors.