Ars Bonifacii

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The Ars Bonifacii is the title given to a Latin grammar ascribed to Saint Boniface.

Latin grammar grammar of the Latin language

Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood. The inflections are often changes in the ending of a word, but can be more complicated, especially with verbs.

Saint Boniface 8th-century Anglo-Saxon missionary and saint

Saint Boniface, born Winfrid in the Devon town of Crediton, England, was a leading figure in the Anglo-Saxon mission to the Germanic parts of the Frankish Empire during the 8th century. He organized Christianity in many parts of Germania and was made archbishop of Mainz by Pope Gregory III. He was martyred in Frisia in 754, along with 52 others, and his remains were returned to Fulda, where they rest in a sarcophagus which became a site of pilgrimage. Boniface's life and death as well as his work became widely known, there being a wealth of material available—a number of vitae, especially the near-contemporary Vita Bonifatii auctore Willibaldi, legal documents, possibly some sermons, and above all his correspondence. He became the patron saint of Germania, known as the "Apostle of the Germans".

Contents

Textual history

The text survives in three manuscripts.

  1. The so-called Kaufunger Fragment, named for Kaufungen Abbey; this may have been copied in the south of England even during the saint's lifetime (he died in 754).
  2. Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Pal. Lat. 1746, a codex deriving from Lorsch, Hessen, consisting of a number of varied text, including the Rule of St. Augustine and Isidore's Etymologiae , as well as another Anglo-Saxon grammar, by Tatwine.
  3. Bibliothèque nationale Paris, Lat. 17959, a composite codex whose second part, containing the grammars by Boniface and Tatwine, is possibly from the abbey of Saint-Riquier. [1]

The latter two date from the late eighth-early ninth centuries, and both also contain the grammar of Tatwine, [1] though Vivien Law notes that the two did not share a transmission history and came to the two codices by different ways--Tatwine's likely from England to the court of Charlemagne, and Boniface's from the areas in Germany where Anglo-Saxon missionaries were active. [2]

Vivien Anne Law, Lady Shackleton, was a British linguist and academic, who specialised in grammar. Over her lifetime, she "acquired a grammatical knowledge of over a hundred languages". She spent all her academic career at the University of Cambridge.

Charlemagne King of the Franks, King of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor

Charlemagne or Charles the Great, numbered Charles I, was King of the Franks from 768, King of the Lombards from 774, and Holy Roman Emperor from 800. He united much of western and central Europe during the Early Middle Ages. He was the first recognised emperor to rule from western Europe since the fall of the Western Roman Empire three centuries earlier. The expanded Frankish state that Charlemagne founded is called the Carolingian Empire. He was later canonized by Antipope Paschal III.

Sources

The basic framework of Boniface's grammar derives from Aelius Donatus's Ars Maior, though his examples are drawn from elsewhere. [3] It shares four sources with Tatwine's: Donatus, Priscian, [4] Isidore, and Asporius. In addition, Boniface used Charisius, Phocas, Audax, Diomedes Grammaticus, Sergius (pseudo-Cassiodorus), [5] Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, and Aldhelm to provide him with theory and examples. [6]

Aelius Donatus was a Roman grammarian and teacher of rhetoric. St. Jerome states in Contra Rufinum 1.16 that Donatus was his tutor.

Priscian Latin grammarian

Priscianus Caesariensis, commonly known as Priscian, was a Latin grammarian and the author of the Institutes of Grammar which was the standard textbook for the study of Latin during the Middle Ages. It also provided the raw material for the field of speculative grammar.

Flavius Sosipater Charisius was a Latin grammarian.

Boniface's Latin was church Latin; it was used specifically to read scripture and liturgy, as well as commentary on scripture. However, in contrast with earlier grammars from the fourth and fifth centuries, his grammar is written for an audience that learned Latin as a foreign language. The Christian backdrop for such language learning also meant that Boniface and other grammarians at the time had to incorporate non-Latin terms and names (specifically, some Greek terminology and Hebrew names) in the Latin grammatical system. In general, Boniface's Latin was heavily influenced by Aldhelm; in 1931, Paul Lehmann even identified the grammar as having been written by Aldhelm. [2]

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References

  1. 1 2 Eckhardt, Wilhelm-Alfred (1969). "Das Kaufunger Fragment der Bonifatius-Grammatik". Scriptorium. 23 (2): 280–97. doi:10.3406/scrip.1969.3375. ISSN   0036-9772.
  2. 1 2 Law A., Vivien (1980). "The transmission of the Ars Bonifacii and the Ars Tatuini". Revue d'histoire des textes. 9 (1979): 281–88. doi:10.3406/rht.1980.1206. ISSN   0373-6075.
  3. ↑ Law, Vivien A. (1987). "Grammars and Language Change: An Eighth-Century Case". Latin Vulgaire, Latin Tardif. 1: 133–44.
  4. ↑ Passalacqua, Marina (1993). "Priscian's Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo in the Ninth Century". In Vivien Law. History of Linguistic Thought in the Early Middle Ages. John Benjamins. pp. 193–204. ISBN   9789027245588.
  5. ↑ Lockett, Leslie (2011). Anglo-Saxon Psychologies in the Vernacular and Latin Traditions. U of Toronto P. p. 241. ISBN   9781442642171.
  6. ↑ Law, Vivien A. (1983). "The Study of Latin Grammar in Eighth-Century Southumbria". Anglo-Saxon England . 12: 43–71.
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