The early Middle Ages

Abstract

Linguistic thought in the Middle Ages With this chapter we enter the western Middle Ages properly speaking – the millennium between Priscian and the Northern Renaissance, roughly 500 to 1500. Throughout this period scholars across Europe dedicated themselves to the twofold task of working through what they had inherited from Greco-Roman Antiquity, and of reconciling that inheritance with Christian doctrine. This long-drawn-out process took place in stages defined both by the character of the linguistic thinking of the epoch and by the classical writings on language known at the time. For by no means all the ancient writings on language that we have met in earlier chapters were known in every part of western Europe continuously from the end of Antiquity. Some monastic libraries had half-a-dozen Late Latin grammars, others a different half-dozen, and a few especially well-stocked collections had ten or more. Rarely did any two libraries own quite the same selection. Some texts were virtually unknown for hundreds of years, coming back into circulation after a lapse of several centuries. Thus, Priscian's Partitiones and in some areas his Institutiones grammaticae , and Aristotle's Categories and De interpretatione were unknown up until a little before 800; Aristotle's remaining logical writings and the Metaphysics until around 1150; and Varro's De lingua latina until 1355. For this reason alone it would be wrong to regard linguistic thought in the Middle Ages as a monolithic whole. And throughout these centuries, people's interests and priorities changed, as did their views on the best ways to teach and present linguistic doctrine.