In the Etymologiae Isidore begins his discussion of grammatical--given the basic formulation loquendi peritia--by noting briefly, also simply, that "letters are signs of things," such that words might be indicated, as when the human voice is not present (sunt indices rerum, signa verborum, quibus tanta vis est, ut nobis dicta absentium sine voce loquantur; Etymologiae I.iii). As is quite often the case with Isidore, simple observations are compounded, explicated, buttressed with testimonial citations, until--by dint of repetition and onerous detail--a complex, sound, stalwart structure is revealed. Not that, etymologically speaking, Isidore got even half of it right; but, to paraphrase Housman on Bentley, one can often learn more wrong from Isidore than from many another right. Turning to Ælfric (c. 955-1020) among the early medieval English grammarians (though better known as the homilist, Ælfric was first and foremost an educator), one encounters a distillation and compression of the tradition borne by Priscian, Donatus, Isidore; prolix only in their use of examples, the heart of the matter is gotten to right away: dyptongus is twyfeald sweg oþþe twyfeald stÆfgefeg, and þara synd feowor (Ælfric, Grammar, de diptongis). The clarity, even when overly literal-minded, suggests purpose, and the Anglo-Latin Excerptiones de Prisciano show how the tradition passed from the late antique grammarians to a schoolman such as Ælfric and his important Latin grammar (the first to explicate the language in a European vernacular). David Porter's edition and--rather rare for such a text--translation into English of the Excerptiones evidences a patience with having to render lists of examples (as with section IV, on verbs), and forbearance in the face of a relentlessly programmatic text (late in it the author himself asks Sed quid de his laborandum?). Not a text to be taken into hand and read whole necessarily, we are to be grateful that Porter has made it available in a nearly fully critical edition--not used is the Chartres manuscript once believed lost and which apparently came to light too late for inclusion in this text (in itself an interesting story of re-identified charred remnants of a Priscian manuscript reported a wartime loss in 1944).
In part reflecting the nature of such a text--more or less a catalogue divided into categories and sub-categories building toward a whole (namely, the comprehension of a grammar)--, in part to aid the expected reader of the text (either one already quite familiar with the tradition interested in its reception in the early medieval period, or one after the handling of a particular feature or device), the following comments are offered catalogue style.
Misprints and other minor infelicities: in a text replete with examples and lists of inflected forms some misprints are inevitable, and they are, on whole, rare in Porter's Excerptiones; they follow cited by page and line number: 21,4: read Institutio for Institution30, fn. 106: for Cotton Domitian 1 read Domitian I (as at 18, fn. 61 and elsewhere) 32,2: Schulgrammatik for schulgrammatik (as at 31, 32) 38,22: saints' Lives for saints Lives39,6: "appears to have been both" for "appears to have both"71,21: "myrtle" for "myrtel" (an interesting slip for a glossary list section as it seems to have been triggered by neighboring MdE "laurel" and "cornel")80,24, 81,26: "Terence" for "Terrence"; a proofreader's problem has produced the geminate r in several places, in English; thus it occurs correctly as Terence (10,32) but Terrence also at 331, nn.88 and 109 and 353, n.20; this causes confusion in reading the Latin at a few points, as one cannot determine if the manuscript has the geminate form or the proofreader (so at 108,10: hic Terrentius, o Terrenti, translated as "O Terence").359, nn. 9, 34-5: just a minor inconsistency in citing in abbreviated form Donatus: Ars maj. (9), Ars mai. (34-5); it is referred to in the introduction as Ars maior.
The brevity of the list of misprints and minor nature of its elements speaks to the overall care with details in this edition. A point that matters since the author of the Excerptiones loves to give great lists of examples and inflected forms, and the nature of the text gave rise to hundreds of notes textual and explanatory.
Introduction
Indispensable to a text of this nature is an introduction setting out how the text came to be and the value and use of its wealth of raw material--and it often is raw material, in the sense that it gathers together late classical-early medieval grammatical material in a form as used in the late tenth century, and in the sense that, as a source of Ælfric's Grammar it "produced a finely articulated view of pre-Conquest English that was a ready-made pathway into the language" (xi-xii). Although the description of the text's value as a "fortuitous interface" is a little jarring in its yoking of diction "antique" and postmodern, the way was made clear, as Porter notes, for the recovery of Old English by Renaissance antiquarians--the study of which recovery and the history of which scholarship now constitute a whole subdiscipline of remarkable and perhaps partly unnecessary prolixity. Text, title, and copies are turned to first in the introduction, as is the relationship between Ælfric's Grammar (which he called has excerptiones de Prisciano minore uel maiore; Zupitza 1880: 1), a bilingual text, and the monolingual Excerptiones here edited for the first time. Ælfric's composition of his Grammar is placed 992 x 1002 and we know from him his purpose: to make available a grammar of Latin for English-speaking schoolboys: uobis puerulis tenellis ad uestram linguam (to Porter's rendering "For you young boys" the tenellis, "tender," could perhaps be restored, though ancient and medieval affectionate diminutives do not generally fare well in the postmodern age). Two closely related Anglo-Saxon copies preserve the text (Antwerp, Plantin-Moretus 16.2 + London BL Add. 32246 and Paris BN nouv. acq. lat. 586) and these are given careful discussion (2-9).
The Paris manuscript of the Excerptiones seems particularly interesting for, while written in the main by one Anglo-Caroline hand of the early eleventh century (the first two quires are twelfth-century replacements), it contains glosses to scholia in Old English (printed by Porter at 378) and Old French (379). This may indeed make it "the sole pre-Conquest manuscript with text glossing in both French and English" (3); the dorse of a twelfth-century roll of charters (Oxford, Bodleian Library Norfolk Rolls 81) shows similar multilingual activity (Ker item 347). The damaged Chartres manuscript (Bibliotheque municipale 56) used in this edition is given a good description based upon microfilm copy (4-6); not mentioned or explained away is Ker's reference to "copies" in Chartres BM 35 and 56 (Ker item 2). Though a continental origin is posited for the text, the insular Antwerp-London and Paris copies seem to be independent witnesses of the original, which makes the Chartres fragments all the more valuable (though Porter notes that they were so damaged that the microfilm copy made reading all the more difficult; more may be had in the future from these charred fragments). Despite the independent witness provided by the copies, Porter indicates the likelihood that both "were present together at the same monastic school" (7). To complicate matters further, scribal evidence points toward Abingdon and textual evidence toward Canterbury; a neat enough solution is proposed in a cooperation between the two important monastic centers (referring also to work on glossing to Aldhelm's De uirginitate by Scott Gwara). When Porter remarks that "revisiting every nuance of this question would necessarily entail a lengthy digression" (8), one wishes that he had indulged in such digression. Where better than in the edition? Publisher constraints on page counts produce a scholarly culture of edition plus apparatus of scattered journal articles and leave one longing for the comprehensive critical edition of old (and not the "bishop's nephew" electronic versions). Nonetheless, the précis of a single scribe's work in the Antwerp-London Excerptiones, an Antwerp Boethius manuscript (Plantin-Moretus 16.8), and the Brussels Aldhelm manuscript (Royal Library 1650, famous for the sheer volume of glossing in Old English) is helpful and intriguing: "Although he is nowhere the principal scribe, the evidence shows that he has had a major hand in planning the volumes and that he has directed the work of other scribes" (9).
Pithy too is Porter's discussion of Priscian (9-12) and the afterlife of his Institutiones grammaticae. The notion of "empty questions" in grammatical literature--Porter gives the example "Do verbs [nouns/pronouns?] have a first-person form of the vocative" (11)--has perhaps less to do with "pedantry" (though it is pedantic) and perhaps more with style. The need for symmetry, to fill out all paradigms, to find or even fabricate roots to all stems and affixes seems universal in grammatical literature. It is certainly present in Panini, who produced, for Sanskrit, one of the earliest great grammatical works attempting in the contemporary view a "complete" grammar. As Priscian (of Mauretania, active in the 5th-6th centuries AD) produced his Institutiones in Byzantium, the parallel drawn between the Byzantine students instructed by the grammarian himself and those Anglo-Saxon learning from his work is understandable, though the statement that the latter "perhaps no less than their Byzantine counterparts were heirs to Roman culture" (11) may be a bit of an overstatement (no Anglo-Saxon king declared himself Augustus or was declared such by his troops for one; many other differences in kind or degree obtain); but the assertion seems cogent that "Priscian's Byzantine student and Ælfric's Anglo-Saxon oblate served remarkably similar apprenticeships in Latinity, and in both cases Priscian offered their most sophisticated tool" (11-12). Remarkable too is the rapid dissemination of Priscian's text, written in Constantinople 526-7, it reached Anglo-Saxon England by the seventh century. Porter exercises due caution in assigning to Theodore of Tarsus the transmission of Priscian to Britain (Bischoff and Lapidge 1994); so much has been placed on the shoulders of the Tarsan and the school at Canterbury he founded with Hadrian that the man must be stumbling under the weight. As the earliest complete copy of the Institutiones comes perhaps originally from Ireland (and was transmitted to St. Gall, an Irish-founded and -influenced continental center), a recensio scotica has been identified (with glossing in Irish), and Irish monks were especially influential in the education of Anglo-Saxon monks (Aldhelm had an Irish master, and King Alfred welcomed Irish scholars), another route of transmission seems quite possible. To this, in part (e.g., the Irish grammarian Murethach), Porter turns in a consideration of "Priscian in the continental schools" (15-20). One quibble is with the statement that "Driven by Danish invasions [starting in the eighth century], Irish masters established themselves in schools from the Channel to the Alps where they lectured on the advanced grammatical studies represented by Priscian" (16); the activities scholastic and missionary of the peregrini were of course even earlier (and left to a footnote is the vital information that "Irish words preserving linguistic forms of the seventh century show that some [Priscian] glosses are considerably older than the St Gallen manuscript itself" [20, fn. 70]). But the treatment of the continental life of Priscian's Institutiones is especially valuable. And how could a roster including the likes of Alcuin, Hrabanus Maurus, Lupus of Ferrieres, Haymo, Heiric, Murethach, and Remigius of Auxerre not be? (A list that also emphasizes again the role of Irish scholars in the insular and, especially, continental Priscian dissemination and commentary.)
The discussion of Priscian and the Excerptiones in continental schools and scholarship (15-21) produces two pithy points of particular note as they get to the more general points of the thinking to the text's composition and use and reception. The first of these addresses the seemingly haphazard nature of early medieval grammatical and glossarial texts: "A running commentary was incidental and discursive--in greater or lesser depth the arcana among Priscian's texts might stimulate excurses into the language (etymologies, etc.), history (Roman consuls or emperors), mythology (Pan and other gods), into Roman religion (the festival of Lupercal) or politics, such as the Roman senate. Thus critical thinking, such as it was in the ninth century, embroidered the same fabric worked by the late antique school: the base text can be a point of departure in any direction" (19). This is a vitally important point, and one that can perhaps only be realized by having to work through the text entire, as an editor or translator must, but few other readers ever will with a corpus usually deemed subliterary. And, secondly, and despite the use here (and elsewhere) of the term paratext--appealing no doubt to readers more interested in text as it serves theory, and therefore perhaps too ready a formulation--on the form of the text and of the excerptiones derived from it: "The untidy form of the paratext in the many scattered Priscian manuscripts poses severe obstacles to study, but despite this variability, it is known that Priscian's texts often carried a common core of glosses, a shared though very plastic tradition" (20). Anyone who has worked through the grammatical corpus published by Heinrich Keil and the vast apparatus of scholia and glosses the grammatical treatises generated will know how apt a description that last phrase is.
Two further broad matters are addressed: the origin of the Excerptiones (namely, insular or continental) and authorship. Porter evenhandedly discusses what few certainties there are in the face of the far greater uncertainties: evidence for continental compilation seems stronger (one would need firmer evidence than exists for a strong insular tradition of Priscian scholarhip--presumably other than the Irish scholarship that one assumes lay behind the St. Gall Priscian); and Ælfric himself is a natural candidate for authorship (possibly with good stylistic support: Jones 1998, though the corpus sampled is likely too narrow), though Abbo of Fleury is also entertained. Thus it still seems somewhat insecure, even in light of shared batches of lemmata and other similarities between bilingual Anglo-Saxon glossaries and the Excerptiones, to speak of "the school of the Excerptiones" (37-9).
In his "On the Edition and Translation" Porter explains the choice of the Paris manuscript as the base text and the brevity of the apparatus (381-393), which excludes "variants of B [Antwerp-London] judged to be purely orthographic alternatives or unrevealing scribal slips" (40). And, as a disclaimer of sorts to an admittedly difficult text to translate, Porter cautions that "the translation is an aid to the Latin text, not a substitute for it" (41). One note that proves irksome at points and was beyond the repair of the editor and translator is the treatment of e caudata: "Following the conventions of this series, tailed e is represented by ordinary e" (40); this produces the infelicitous muse for musae (54; I:49, the rubric for which is De diptongis) and the glaring sunt autem he (66; II:25), and it undercuts, however mildly, the point in II:163 Prima igitur est declinatio, cuius genitiuus in -ae dyptongon desinit, ut `hic poeta, huius poete' (100).
Text and translation
In a text so densely packed with examples relevant or discursive, comments (on the whole not animadversions) will again be listed, the relative brevity of the list--however much it may not strike a reader so--is testimony to the care of the text and accompanying translation (and translator's endurance); citation is by page and relevant section numbers:
44-5 (De Voce): dealing with the most basic of matters, the text is spare and difficult from the start:
Philosophi definiunt uocem esse aerem tenuissimum ictum uel suum sensibile aurium, id est quod proprie auribus accidit ("Philosophers define the sound of speech to be thin air which is struck, or its perception by the ears; in strictest terms, that which reaches the ears"); auditory vocabulary is being introduced here, and the Latin itself here seems problematic. The superlative tenuissimum should probably be noted in the translation, while the sense of accidere given seems just right (of what comes to the ears or their notice, such as Livy's uox accidit ad auris/auribus, or the uox ad auris accidit of Nonius Marcellus, the grammarian or republican Latin). Helpful at times to the reader are the contemporary scholia (361-377); here of use: tenuissimum: subtilissimum, ictum: pulsatum, sensibile: perceptibile (the latter reading in each case from B). The translation of the Virgilian opening Arma uirumque cano seems jarring as "I sing arms and the man."
que scribi non possunt. Intelliguntur tamen ("These cannot be written even though they can be understood."). Perhaps too immediate a causal relationship is signaled by the translation; more literally, "which cannot be written. They are nevertheless understood."
uel a sono, ut quibusdam placet ("or as some think, it is named from a sound"). Priscian, as Porter's commentary notes (327), holds out an alternative onomatopoeic origin for uox, that is, not deriving etymologically from uocando (as, he says, rex a regendo dux a ducendo); thus, perhaps more literally, as Priscian himself is speaking of variability, "or from sound [onomatopoiea], as is pleasing to some." Priscian does not seem terribly vexed about the particular etymology, rather more interested in proceeding on to grammar.
50-1 (I: 26-7): Porter's translation attempts at a number of points to pair Priscian's linguistic schema with that of modern language study and linguistics; while such a method can risk overreaching, it has in this work some felicitous results: I:26 uoce abscondita is rendered as sotto voce and per commutationem as "reciprocal change." Compare also IV:125 where addita t is rendered "by adding an epenthetic t" (244-5).
54-5 (I:54): The clarity of Priscian, even as culled by the Excerptiones, shines through in many of the introductory subsections of the text; e.g., De sillaba:
Sillaba est comprehensio litterarum consequens sub uno accentu et uno spiritu prolata. Possumus tamen et sic diffinire sillabam: sillaba est uox litteralis, que sub uno accentu et uno spiritu indistanter profertur.
The syllable is a combination of letters proceeding with one accent and pronounced with one breath. We can nevertheless define the syllable thus: the syllable is an utterance expressible in writing, which is pronounced without interruption and with one accent and one breath.
Similarly clear are the account of varying historical counts of the parts of speech (I: 66-69), the definition of the verb (I:72 and IV:1), Roman nomenclature (and alleged Sabine influence on the system; II:4 [61]), which precedes the fuller treatment of patronymics at II:26-34 (66-69), and the participle (VI:1, 266-7).
II: 40: In a subsection on the possessive (II: 33-43 [68-73]) laden if not littered with examples, the desire for some brevity is understandable; perhaps matutinus (a Matuta, que significat Auroram), "`matutinal' (from matuta 'dawn')" (72-3) could be allowed its fuller form: "from Metuta, goddess of the early morning, which signifies Aurora"; the pagan gods were not by and large expunged by the maker of the Excerptiones, and this may be a case in favor of a little more wordiness.
II: 74-94: In a lengthy discussion of the diminutive of nouns, style becomes a matter for the translator: but who would not like scolasticus scolasticulus scolasticiculus "scholar, little scholar, wee little scholar," or Antoniaster "little Tony" (80-1, 84-5).
II: 347,351: The occasional reminder survives in the Excerptiones of Priscian's voice: Priscianus docet.... Ego Priscianus scribo....Priscianus nuncupor (154-5; and IV:52, 206-7).
IV: 58-60ff.: The conjugation of verbs produces tedious lists of examples; naturally one would like to edit or elide where possible; nonetheless, preserving the pattern amo amas "I love, you love" (rather than just giving one form in translation) helps preserve the rhythm of the parsing.
VIII: 34: Porter had mentioned in his introduction that "a sizeable commonplace book could be compiled from the Excerptiones' excerpts of Roman authors" (12); no doubt still valid for students such as those of Ælfric is the admonition from the likes of Persius Sacer est locus, extra meite ("The place is sacred, urinate outside"; 298-9).
VIII: 57: Mentioned earlier is the tendency to want to match up Priscian's linguistic vocabulary with that of the modern discipline; the rendering of the rubric De Sex Loquelaribus as "The Six Prepositional Bound Morphemes" (308-9) may push this desire for equivalence a bit too far.
X:1 -34: Given the rubric "Compiler's Additions from Isidore, etc.," we get a good sense of the compiler's good sense in culling from contemporary grammatical and linguistic authors whatever would seem necessary to the monastic classroom; here, a wonderfully concise definition of grammar and rhetoric (X:9) and a catalogue of various tropes or figures (scema Grece figura interpraetatur; X:30). And the compiler as schoolman shows through after a section on orthography with the declaration Sed prosequamur ceteram, quia longum est ire per singula (X:14). Either Priscian tired more easily of orthography than, say, prepositions, or he had a keen sense of irony.
A relatively short commentary of brief entries follows (327-359), and it is largely a testimonial apparatus. Nonetheless, it involves nearly 1200 notes. In addition to the classical authors cited by Priscian retained by the Excerptiones' compiler mentioned by Porter in his introduction (Virgil, Sallust, Horace, Cato, Terence, and Pliny; 12), one can add from these notes Cicero, Juvenal, Lucan, Naevius, Persius, Plautus, Statius and a passage from Ennius' Annales preserved only by Priscian's citation. The four appendices to the text cover scholia (361-79), textual apparatus (381-93; these are mainly manuscript variants as the edition is primarily a diplomatic one), a brief glossary of tree names from fol. 28V of the Paris manuscript (395-6), and the foliation of the Antwerp-London manuscript (397).
One more mention must be made about the nature of this text: its sheer bulk, in examples, citations, and lists of inflected forms--only a careful reading of which gives a full sense of the work that has gone into Porter's edition and translation; patient readers of the text would of course generate lists of their own, of points where they would nod in agreement, disagreement, or puzzlement. Beyond this of course are Priscian's words and presence, even so excerpted by the anonymous compiler. And in the end, this is Priscian's schoolroom; an inherent value of the text, apart from what it can tell us of intellectual history, reception theory and so forth, is that it still teaches Latin. Unlike medieval expositors of other disciplines (astronomy, medicine, geology), the late antique and medieval grammarians are more fortunate in that more of what they taught is still right, however neglected in modern schooling.
And, lastly, emphasis may be given again to the value of having the accompanying translation to the Excerptiones. Much of the apparatus of the medieval grammatical tradition remains in Latin, the sheer bulk of the corpus perhaps consigning much of it to remain untranslated for some time to come, while the professional obligation of the linguist or medievalist to read it in the original seems now perhaps of less force. But in the particular case of the Excerptiones, the translation helps make the link to what the mid-tenth century text led to with the English schoolman Ælfric: the explication of a tradition in the classical languages in a medieval European vernacular--here, Old English--with an economy of form and prose and a clarity of formulation so wanting in modern linguistics, which with its broad pretensions to science and impenetrable jargon loses sight at time of what Isidore pithily termed the origo et fundamentum liberalium litterarum
References:
Bischoff, Bernhard and Michael Lapidge, eds. Biblical Commentaries from the Canterbury School of Theodore and Hadrian (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Gwara, Scott, "Canterbury Affiliations of London, BL Royal 7 D.XXIV and Brussels, Bibliotheque Royale 1650 (Aldhelm's Prosa de virginitate)," Romanobarbarica 14 (1997): 359-74Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum Libri XX, ed. W.M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911)Jones, Christopher, "Meatim Sed et Rustica: Ælfric of Eynsham as a Medieval Latin Author," Journal of Medieval Latin 8 (1998): 1-57Ker, N.R. Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957)Zupitza, Julius, ed. Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar (Berlin: Weidmann, 1880)