These general statements find illustration in the famous Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa-Dei, whose author was born in Normandy in the latter half of the twelfth century. He studied at Paris, and in course of time was summoned by the Bishop of Dol to instruct his nepotes in grammar. While acting as their tutor, he appears to have helped their memory by setting his rules in rhyme; and the bishop asked him to write a Summa of grammar in some such fashion. Complying, he composed the Doctrinale in the year 1199, putting his work into leonine or rhyming hexameter, to make it easier to memorize. Rarely has a school-book met with such success. It soon came into use in Paris and elsewhere, and for some three hundred years was the common manual of grammatical teaching throughout western Europe. It was then attacked and apparently driven from the field by the so-called Humanists, who, however, failed to offer anything better in its place, and plagiarized from the work which they professed to execrate.[182]
The etymological portions of the Doctrinale follow the teachings of the Priscianus major; the part devoted to syntax, or constructio, shows traces of the influence of the Priscianus minor. But Alexander’s treatment of syntax is more systematic and elaborate than Priscian’s; and he did not hesitate to defer to the Vulgate and other Christian Latin writings. Thus he made his work conform to contemporary usage, which its purpose was to set forth. He did the same in the section on Prosody, in which he says that the ancient metricians distinguished a number of feet no longer used, and he will confine himself to six—the dactyl, spondee, trochee, anapaest, iambus, and tribrach.[183] In contradiction to classical usage he condemns elision;[184] and in his chapter on accent he throws over the ancient rules:
“Accentus normas legitur posuisse vetustas;
Non tamen has credo servandas tempore nostro.”[185]
Alexander was not really an innovator. He followed previous grammarians in condemning elision, and in what he says of quantity and accent. In his syntax he endeavoured to set forth rules conforming to the best Latin usage of his time, like other mediaeval grammarians before him. He was indeed vehement in his advocacy of recent and Christian authors as standards of writing, and he inveighed against the scholars of Orleans, who read the Classics, and would have us sacrifice to the gods and observe the indecent festivals of Faunus and Jove.[186] But others defended the Orleans school, and perhaps still regarded the Classics as the best arbiters of grammar and eloquence. There exist thirteenth-century grammars which follow Priscian more closely than Alexander does.[187] Yet his work represents the dominant tendencies of his time.
Twelfth and thirteenth century grammarians recommended to their pupils a variety of reading, in which mediaeval and early Christian compositions held as large a place as Virgil and Ovid. The Doctrinale advocates no work more emphatically than Petrus Riga’s Aurora, a versified paraphrase of Scripture. Its author was a chorister in Rheims, and died in 1209.[188] The works of scholastic philosophers were not cited as frequently as the compositions of verse-writers; yet mediaeval grammarians were influenced by the language of philosophy, and drew from its training principles which they applied to their own science. Grammar could not help becoming dialectical when the intellectual world was turning to logic and metaphysics. Commencing in the twelfth century, overmasteringly in the thirteenth, logic penetrated grammar and compelled an application of its principles. Often grammarians might better have looked to linguistic usage than to dialectic; yet if grammar was to become a rational science, it had to systematize itself through principles of logic, and make use of dialectic in its endeavour to state a reason for its rules. Those who applied logic to grammar at least endeavoured to distinguish between the two, not always fruitfully. But a real difference could not fail to assert itself inasmuch as logic was in truth of universal application, while mediaeval grammar never ceased to be the grammar of the Latin language. Nevertheless its terminology was largely drawn from logic.[189]
So dialectic brought both good and ill, proving itself helpful in the regulation of syntax, but banefully affecting grammarians with the conviction that language was the creature of reason, and must conform to principles of logic. One likewise notes with curious interest, that, from their dialectic training apparently, grammarians first found as many species of grammar as languages,[190] and then forsook this idea for the view that, in order to be a science, grammar must be universal, or, as they phrased it, one, and must possess principles not applicable specially to Greek or Latin, but to congruous construction in the abstract; “de constructione congrua secundum quod abstrahit ab omni lingua speciali,” are the words of the English thirteenth-century philosopher and grammarian, Robert Kilwardby.[191] A like idea affected Roger Bacon, who composed a Greek grammar,[192] which appears to have been intended as the first part of a work upon the grammars of the learned languages other than Latin. It was adapted to afford a grounding in the elements of Greek: yet it touches matters in a way showing that the writer had thought deeply on the affinities of languages and the common principles of grammar. Of this the following passage is evidence:
“Therefore, because I wish to treat of the properties of Greek grammar, it should be known that there are differences in the Greek language, to be hereafter noted in giving the names of these dialects (idiomata). And I call them idiomata and not linguas, because they are not different languages, but different properties which are peculiarities (idiomata) of the same language.[193] Wishing to set forth Greek grammar, for the use of the Latins, it is necessary to compare it with Latin grammar, because I commonly speak Latin myself, seeing that the crowd does not know Greek; also because grammar is of one and the same substance in all languages, although varying in its non-essentials (accidentaliter), also because Latin grammar in a certain special way is derived from Greek, as Priscian says, and other grammarians.”[194]
The dialecticizing of grammar took place in the north, under influences radiating from Paris, the chief dialectic centre. These did not deeply affect grammatical studies in Italy, or in the Midi of France, which in some respects exhibited like intellectual tendencies. Grammar was zealously studied in Italy, but it did not there become either speculative or dialectical. To be sure northern manuals were used, especially the Doctrinale; but the study remained practical, an art rather than a science, and its chief element, or end, was the ars dictaminis or dictandi. The grammatical treatises of Italians were treatises upon this art of epistolary composition and the proper ways of drawing documents. These works were studied also in the North, where the ars dictaminis was by no means neglected.[195]
Latin grammar, although over-dialecticized in the North, and in Italy made very practical, remained of necessity the foundation of classical studies, and of mediaeval literary effort, in prose and verse. As the basis of liberal studies, it had no truer home than the cathedral school of Chartres.[196] Contemporary writers picture the manner in which this study was there made to perform its most liberal office, under favourable mediaeval conditions, in the first half of the twelfth century. The time antedates the Doctrinale, and one notes at once that the Chartrian masters used the ancient grammatical authorities. This is shown by the Eptateuchon of Thierry, who was headmaster (scholasticus) and then Chancellor there for a number of years between 1120 and 1150. As its name implies, the work was a manual, or rather an encyclopaedia, of the Seven Arts. Thierry compiled it from the writings of the “chief doctors on the arts.” He transcribed the Ars minor of Donatus and then portions of his larger work. Having commended this author for his conciseness and subtilty, Thierry next copied out the whole of Priscian. As text-books for the second branch of the Trivium, he gives Cicero’s De inventione rhetorica libri 2, Rhetoricorum ad Herennium libri 4, De partitione oratoria dialogus, and concludes with the rhetorical writings of Martianus Capella and J. Severianus.[197]
So much for the books. Now for the method of teaching as described by John of Salisbury. He gives the practice of Bernard of Chartres, Thierry’s elder brother, who was scholasticus and Chancellor before him, in the first quarter of the twelfth century. John has been advocating the study of grammar as the fundamentum atque radix of those exercises by which virtue and philosophy are reached; and he is advising a generous reading of the Classics by the student, and their constant use by the professor, to illustrate his teaching.