Opera omnia III
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Book Series
Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, vol. 293
- Pages: xciii + 222 p.
- Size:155 x 245 mm
- Language(s):Latin
- Publication Year:2019
- € 200,00 EXCL. VAT RETAIL PRICE
- ISBN: 978-2-503-58231-3
- Hardback
- Available
Critical edition of a Latin grammar from Charlemagne's court circle
Review(s)
“L. and R. make an outstanding contribution to our knowledge of culture in Charlemagne’s age, since their edition accurately reconstructs the internal history of the text, respects its original aspect, and places it in the general course of development of grammar in the Carolingian age, when grammar, the first and most important of the seven liberal arts, was being affected by important changes. Thanks to them, our knowledge of the history of grammar in the Middle Ages is now more accurate.” (Estrella Perez Rodriguez, in Mitellateinisches Jahrbuch, 56/1, 2021, p. 189)
BIO
Anneli Luhtala (PhD, 1994) is a lecturer of Latin literature at the University of Helsinki. She studied at the University of Helsinki and was a visiting student and scholar in Clare Hall, Cambridge. Her publications include two monographs on ancient language theories as well as articles and editions of medieval grammatical texts. Anna Reinikka’s PhD thesis (University of Helsinki, 2013) was a first edition of a late antique Latin grammar, Ars Pseudo-Scauri.
Summary
Peter of Pisa was among the scholars invited by Charlemagne to his court in the late 780s, and, according to Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, he taught grammar to the Emperor himself. The present book offers a critical edition of the textbook on grammar that Peter composed while teaching in the palatine school. It has survived in three versions, which enable us to see, how Peter’s ideas on language pedagogy developed, when new grammatical works and methods of teaching became accessible to scholars in the court circle. Grammatical education was at the heart of the Carolingian reform of learning, which owed many of its crucial features to Alcuin of York. His teaching of the Liberal Arts assigned major importance to the use of dialectic in all intellectual inquiry, including the study of grammar. This new approach to grammar, which is first attested in the works of Peter of Pisa and Alcuin, affected not only the advanced study of grammar but even secondary level pedagogy. Interaction between grammar and logic became standard practice with the subsequent generations of grammarians, establishing itself as a permanent feature of medieval culture from the eleventh century onwards. It is to this intellectual context that Peter's manual on grammar is related in the present book.
