The Donatus minor between Via antiqua and Via moderna : Grammar education and the Wegestreit

C. H. Kneepkens
University of Groningen
Abstract

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.

Table of contents

The title or colophon of some 15th- and early-16th-century commentaries on the Donatus minor informs its readership that the commentary they intend to use has been composed in conformity with the principles and methods (secundum viam) of the Antiqui, the Modist(a)e, Thomas Aquinas, or the Moderni. These signposts reflect the academic clash commonly referred to as the Wegestreit. In this period, a conflict between competing schools of thought disrupted intellectual life at the majority of the universities of Western and Central Europe. At stake was the exclusive right to frame the teaching programmes of a university, faculty, or college according to the tenets of a particular line of thought. The mutual controversies were legion and covered a wide range of doctrinal and methodological aspects, but the origin of the conflict must be looked for in fundamentally different views on the ontological status of the universals. Expressed in general words, the Antiqui, who were sometimes subdivided into Thomists, Scotists, and Albertists, defended a realist position, which held that a universal as a common nature or an idea in God’s mind (ante rem), as an immanent form in the individual existing in reality (in re), and abstracted as a universal concept in the human mind (post rem) was one and the same. This means that, in their view, a universal has some degree of reality independent of the human mind but also that the universal existed as a principle of knowledge in the human mind. The Moderni, on the other hand, adhered to a nominalist or conceptualist view and considered the universal only to be a concept, an exclusive product of the human intellect without any existence outside the human mind (Braakhuis 1989: 16).

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References

Sigla used throughout the article

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