Priscian’s institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo in the ninth century

Marina Passalacqua
Università di Roma “La Sapienza”
Summary

The Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo by Priscian enjoyed, unlike the Institutiones grammaticae of which it is a summary, vast popularity in the early Middle Ages, because it provided the basic elements of Latin morphology and swiftly taught students how to decline and conjugate. In the eighth and ninth centuries we find 24 manuscripts in which the text is contaminated to such an extent that it prevents the charting of any stemma codicum, although it is possible to identify the influence of particular codices on one another. The text was well known in France, but there are copies also in Bavaria, in the Abruzzi and in Spain. Only four of these manuscripts contain the Institutiones grammaticae as well: the two works were destined for two very different kinds of public. Their coexistence in Paris, BN, lat. 7498 comes as a response to the need to have the complete corpus of Priscian in Saint-Amand; in Paris, BN, lat. 7503 the position occupied by the treatise suggests that it was felt as a summary of the first section of the Institutiones which deals with the noun, and as a preparation to the second section which concerns verbs; in Reims 1094 didactic considerations appear to predominate; in Wolfenbüttel 64, a witness to the presence of grammatical texts in Lyon, the fragment of the Institutio gives the impression of being a scholastic exercise. It has to be noted, however, that in three manuscripts out of four, the text is inserted into the first seven books of the Institutiones.

The authors whose works most frequently occur together with Institutio are Isidore, Bede, Donatus, Servius’s De finalibus, Sergius’s De littera, Phocas, Sedulius, St. Jerome, Eutyches, Agroecius, Consentius, the Liber de finalibus metrorum, Maximus Victorinus’s De ratione metrorum and Servius’s Commentum in Artem Donati.

The richest manuscripts in terms of texts are the great scholastic manuals Bologna 797, Orléans 295 and St. Gall 878 by Walahfrid Strabo.

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