The hidden curriculum : syntax in Anglo-Saxon Latin teaching [thesis]

274 Pages·2001·11.77 MB·English

by  Carin Ruff

THE HIDDEN CURRICULUM:
SYNTAX IN ANGLO-SAXON LATIN TEACHING
by
Carin Ruff
A Thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements
for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Centre for Medieval Studies
University of Toronto
© Copyright by Carin Ruff 2001
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
1+1 National Library Bibliothfcque nationals
of Canada du Canada
Acquisitions and Acquisitions et
Bibliographic Services services bibliographiques
385 Wellington Street 395. rue WeKngton
Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A0N4
Canada Canada
tw iW ra
Our m mnrnttmret
The author has granted a non­ L’auteur a accordd une licence non
exclusive licence allowing the exclusive permettant a la
National Library of Canada to Bibliothdque nationale du Canada de
reproduce, loan, distribute or sell reproduire, preter, distribuer ou
copies of this thesis in microform, vendre des copies de cette these sous
paper or electronic fonnats. la forme de microfiche/film, de
reproduction sur papier ou sur format
61ectronique.
The author retains ownership of the L’auteur conserve la propriete du
copyright in this thesis. Neither the droit d’auteur qui protege cette these.
diesis nor substantial extracts from it Ni la th&se ni des extraits substantiels
may be printed or otherwise de celle-ci ne doivent etre imprimes
reproduced without the author’s ou autrement reproduits sans son
permission. autorisation.
0 612 78081-3
- -
Canada
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
ABSTRACT
The Hidden Curriculum: Syntax In Anglo-Saxon Latin Teaching
Carin Ruff
PhD 2001, Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Toronto
The Anglo-Saxons were pioneers in the study of Latin as a foreign language, yet they learned Latin
without the help of a systematic account of Latin syntax. In this study, I examine early medieval grammatical
treatises for evidence of how Anglo-Saxon Latin learners might have acquired the tools necessary to
understand the structure of Latin. In studying syntactical doctrine in the early medieval grammatical
curriculum, I strive to redress the bias of recent scholarship that has focused largely on lexical and
morphological aspects of the Anglo-Saxons’ teaching of Latin.
In my Introduction, I survey the accounts of grammar that were most widely available in early
Anglo-Saxon England, Donatus’s Ars minor and Ars maior. Priscian’s Ars de nomine, pronomine, et verbo,
and Book 1 of Isidore’s Etvmologiae. I consider what syntactical doctrine they do contain, and I suggest
what the gaps are between the doctrine available in these works and the skills needed for mastery of Latin.
In Part I, “Evidence from the Metrical Treatises,” I focus on Aldhelm’s De metris and De pedum
regulis and Bede’s De arte metrica. I argue that these accounts of Latin meter offer ways of understanding
language as formally patterned, and also reveal that Anglo-Saxons had a working concept of semantic
completeness.
In Part II, “Bede on Rhetoric and Usage,” I consider Bede’s handbook of rhetorical figures, De
schematibus et tropis. and his handbook of Latin usage, De orthographia. I argue that the rhetorical figures
gave early medieval students their most extensive arsenal of tools for negotiating continuous Latin text.
The De orthographia itself conveys a significant amount of Latin syntax, and it demonstrates that even
more syntactical doctrine must have been in common use in Anglo-Saxon schools.
In Part III, “Carolingian Developments and Later Anglo-Saxon England,” I suggest ways in which
texts newly available in the Carolingian period would have given students additional tools for
understanding the structures of Latin. I survey work currently under way on ninth- and tenth-century
curricular developments, and suggest several avenues of further research into the Anglo-Saxon reception of
those developments.
ii
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
DISSERTATIONS DEDICATIO
sc. quibus
Procurantibus operi meo
Robertae Frank, tam leporis quam brevitatis exemplari,
Michaeli Herren, scrutatori scrupuloso glossarum mearum,
Agricolae Rigg, qui per densam silvam latinitatis viam toties ostendebat,
necnon David Townsend, qui spatium Aldhelmi discutiendi reserabat
et identidem domum suam me liberaliter recipiebat;
item grammaticae peritis Marco Amsler, Annae Grotans, Vivien Law, et Anneli Luhtala,
qui me Kalamazoo Siciliaeque hortati sunt et rem susceptam approbaverunt;
item Sylviae Parsons, conloquiorum Aldhelmianorum Byrhtferthianorumque participi;
sorori meae Christinae Wagner, quae opera G. Knudsvigf mihi prima commendavit;
comitantibus quadrupedibus meis Arloni, Petrof, et Duncano;
qui mane e somno me excitabant, schedas inscriptas opprimebant,
ac domum tam contra hospites quam contra hostes defendebant;
denique parentibus meis,
qui mercedem habitationis persolvebant nec de progressione quaeritabant,
gratias ago et hanc dissertatiunculam dedico.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Abstract ii
Dedication iii
Table of Contents iv
Abbreviations v
Introduction 1
Part I: Evidence from Metrical Treatises
1. Aldhelm’s De metris ac de pedum reeulis 70
2. Bede’s De arte metrica 100
Part II: Bede on Rhetoric and Usage
1. Bede’s De schematibus et tronis 114
2. Bede’s De orthographia 158
Part III: Carolingian Innovations and Later Anglo-Saxon England 189
Bibliography 236
iv
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
ABBREVIATIONS
I have tried as far as possible to restrict the use of abbreviations to the primary
works that are the focus of this study and to series and reference works widely used by
medievalists. These abbreviations are listed here.
Details of editions of primary works are given in the footnotes to relevant chapters
and in the Bibliography. For works cited by author and short title in the text or notes, full
citations may be found in the Bibliography.
A.m. Donatus. Ars minor
A.M. Donatus. Ars maior
Auct. ant. Auctores Antiauissimi (see MGH1)
CCSL Corpus Christianorum Series Latina
DAM Bede. De arte metrica
DM Aldhelm. De metris
DMLBS Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British St
DO Bede. De orthographia
DOE Dictionary of Old English
DPR Aldhelm. De nedum reeulis
DST Bede. De schematibus et tronis
Etym. Isidore of Seville. Etvmoloeiae siue orieines
GL Grammatici Latini. ed. Keil
IG Priscian. Institutiones erammaticae
HE Bede. Historia ecclesiastica
MGH Monumenta Germaniae Historica
OLD Oxford Latin Dictionary
PL Patroloaia Latina
RLM Rhetores Latini Minores. ed. Halm
SGT St. Gall Tractate, ed. Grotans and Porter
TLL Thesaurus Linguae Latinae
v
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
Introduction
As anyone knows who has learned Latin, it is one thing to know a great many
words, their definitions and inflections, and quite another to be able to construe complex
Latin sentences, much less compose them. Modem textbooks of Latin customarily bridge
this gap - between a literally elementary knowledge of the language and facility in
reading and composition - with systematic instruction in the structure of Latin sentences,
the use of the cases, government, the form and function of clauses, and their idiomatic
deployment. Reference grammars typically treat similar information in a separate section
on syntax.
It is a puzzle that the Anglo-Saxons, pioneers in the study of Latin as a foreign
language, managed for centuries with grammars from which such aids were apparently
all but absent. They inherited from late antiquity a system of elementary grammars that
were in many ways inadequate to the needs of non-native speakers, and were enterprising
in developing supplements to and commentaries on these grammars to adapt them to their
own needs.1 The early Middle Ages also inherited grammars that did deal systematically
with syntax - most notably books 17 and 18 of Priscian’s Institutiones grammaticae - but
these were in limited circulation and, where they were known in the seventh and eighth
1 For an inventory and typology of Roman grammars known in the British Isles in the seventh and eighth
centuries and of grammars composed during this period, see Vivien Law, The Insular Latin Grammarians.
(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1982), and also her “Late Latin Grammars in the Early Middle Ages: A
Typological History,” in her volume of collected essays, Grammar and Grammarians in the Earlv Middle
Ages. (London and New York: Longman, 1997): 54-69.
1
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
2
centuries, seem not to have attracted much attention as potential teaching texts.2 Some
have argued that the non-Latin-speaking cultures of early medieval Europe needed,
collectively, to acquire a certain expertise in the formal study of Latin before they were
ready to make use of Priscian’s massive reference grammar and to engage in their own
speculation and creative adaptation of his work.3 Evidence for this adaptation will be
surveyed in Part III of this study. But this explicable delay in engagement with the more
sophisticated syntactical studies of antiquity still does not explain how pre-Carolingian
English speakers fully mastered Latin.
Beyond elementary Latin: The state of our knowledge of pre-Carolingian grammar
The lingering lacuna in our understanding of this aspect of the Anglo-Saxon
curriculum is due in part to a paucity of texts from the period that can clearly be seen to
address the needs of intermediate Latin-leamers. In part, though, it is also due to priorities of
the last two decades’ research on early medieval grammar. It has been the project of the last
2 See Law’s comments in Vivien Law, The Insular Latin Grammarians. (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press,
1982) 20-21. On Irish knowledge of Priscian, see J.F. Kenney, The Sources for the Earlv History of
Ireland, vol. I: Ecclesiastical. 1929. repr. 1966, 1979), 674-677, and for the glosses to the Irish group of
Priscian manuscripts, see Rijklof Hofinan, The Sankt Gall Priscian Commentary. Part 1. (Milnster: Nodus
Publikationen, 1996). Evidence for early Irish engagement with “Priscianus minor”, the two books on
syntax, is lacking, because of defective manuscripts and/or flagging glossators. Aldhelm, whose early
training was presumably Irish, knew Priscian’s Tnstitutiones grammaticae (IG), and I suggest some
implications of this knowledge for his linguistics in Part 1.1, below. However, adaptation of Priscianus
minor for syntactical instruction in schools did not begin until Alcuin began work on the text of the IG in
the last decade of the eighth century. See Part III, below.
3 E.g. Vivien Law, “Late Latin Grammars in the Early Middle Ages: A Typological History,” Grammar
and Grammarians in the Earlv Middle Ages. (London and New Yoric: Longman, 1997) 54-69, at p. 60.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
3
twenty years’ work on the medieval curriculum to identify, characterize, filiate, edit and
publish the grammars of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. This crucial work has,
justifiably, focused on texts that are unambiguously grammatical, and that had the widest
circulation: Donatus’s Ars minor and maior. above all, and the commentaries, expansions,
and supplements to his texts that proliferated in early medieval Europe.4 Also, a confluence
of scholarly interests has resulted in an emphasis on word-level linguistics in early medieval
grammar. Glossaries and lexical glossing have attracted interest from those engaged in the
lexicography of medieval vernaculars, and the prejudice in 19th- and earlier 20th-century
philology in favor of word-level and sub-word-level analysis has reinforced this tendency to
focus on lexical and morphological information in the early grammars.5 When Latin glosses
and glossaries from Anglo-Saxon England have been studied as evidence for language
teaching, as they increasingly have in recent years, the emphasis has still been
4 The seminal study and edition of Donatus is Louis Holtz, Donat et le tradition de l'enseignement
grammatical: etudes sur l'Ars Donati et sa diffusion (TVe - IXe sieclel. (Paris: Centre National de la
Recherche Scientifique, 1981); for Insular reception of late antique grammars, the pioneering work is Law,
The Insular Latin Grammarians. These studies, appearing a year apart, made possible the study of early
medieval grammar as it is now being practiced.
^On the general problem of medieval grammatical materials being appropriated by other disciplines, see
Vivien Law, “The Historiography of Grammar in the Early Middle Ages,” History of Linguistic Thought in
the Earlv Middle Ages, ed. Vivien Law. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic
Science, Series III: Studies in the History of the Language Sciences 71 (Amsterdam: John Benjamins,
1993), 1-23. Reflections on the uses of glossography from a number of scholarly perspectives are gathered
in R. Derolez, ed., Anglo-Saxon Glossographv: Papers Read at the International Conference Held in the
Koniklijke Academie voor Wetenschappen Letteren en Schone Kunsten van Belgie. (Brussels: Paleis der
Academien, 1992). Particularly apropos to the reclamation of glossography by historians of the
grammatical curriculum are Gemot R. Wieland’s articles “Latin Lemma-Latin Gloss: The Stepchild of
Glossologists,” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 19 (1984): 91-99, and “Interpreting the Interpretation: The
Polysemy of the Latin Gloss,” The Journal of Medieval Latin 8 (1998): 59-71.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
4
overwhelmingly lexical, for the very good reason that ostentatious display of unusual
vocabulary is the most conspicuous feature of Anglo-Latin style.6 Thus the pressing need
for editions of the basic texts, the desire to make grammatical materials serve other fields of
investigation, and the dominance of lexical studies tended, until relatively recently, to
distract historians of grammar from ways in which linguistic analysis was taught at levels
larger than the single word.
An exception to this focus on word-level linguistics has been the study of syntactical
glossing (marks in manuscripts designed to elucidate the structure of the Latin text). Even
here, though, early investigations of syntactical glossing focused on the value of such
glosses as evidence for the vernacular languages of the countries where such manuscripts
were glossed. For example, Maartje Draak’s study of what she called “construe marks” in a
number of ninth-century Irish or Irish-Continental manuscripts focused on the relationship
of Old Irish to Latin syntax.7 Similarly, the scholarly back-and-forth between Fred
Robinson, Michael Korhammer, and Patrick O’Neill over Anglo-Saxon syntactical glosses
6 At least, vocabulary is the feature that to date has been most remarked upon. The seminal study of this
style is Michael Lapidge, “The Hermeneutic Style in Tenth-Century Anglo-Latin Literature,” Anglo-Saxon
England 4 (1975): 67-111. For the relation of glossaries to the cultivation of this style, see for example
Lapidge’s “The Study of Latin Texts in Late Anglo-Saxon England [1]: The Evidence of Latin Glosses,”
Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Earlv Medieval Britain, ed. Nicholas Brooks. (Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1982) 99-140, and Scott Gwara’s University of Toronto dissertation, “Literary Culture in
Late Anglo-Saxon England and The Old English and Latin Glosses to Aldhelm's Prosa de Virginitate.”
(1993). David Porter looks at the evidence for Latin vocabulary acquisition in David W. Porter, “The Latin
Syllabus in Anglo-Saxon Monastic Schools,” Neonhilologus 78 (1994): 463-482.
^Maartje Draak, Construe Marks in Hibemo-Latin Manuscripts. Mededelingen der koninklijke
nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen afd. Letterkunde, Nieuwe Reeks, Deel 20, No. 10 (Amsterdam:
N.V. Noord-Hollandsche Uitgevers Maatschapplij, 1957).
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.