한국서양중세사학회

This articles examines the relationship between Latinitas and the development of Latin grammatical discourse in the early Middle Ages, arguing that the changes in the ideal of Latinitas in that period exerted great influence on the changes of the form and content of Latin grammars. Latinitas in Antiquity meant the ideal of eloquence based on the authority of great authors. It was described as the observation of the purity of the Latin language, and the Latin education aimed at training the students to master the literary Latin language to the highest level. As the groups of non-Latin speakers were introduced into the Roman Empire and at the same time as the Latin became the language of Church, the ideal of Latinitas was transformed into the ideal of Christianity. This transformation inevitably led to the transformation of Latin grammatical discourse. The Latin language and the Latin grammars needed to be re-established as the language and grammars of Christianity, and therefore the grammarians of the early Middle Ages vigorously took up the task of reshaping the language and grammar itself. This task was accomplished in various levels of grammars. The Christianization of the language itself was made through the religious interpretation of grammatical features and the alphabets, and the Christianization of the grammars was made by separating the grammatical discipline from the ancient background. The commentaries on the works of Donatus from the fifth century onwards show one of the methods employed by the grammarians to establish the Latin grammar as an independent field of knowledge by itself. The authority of Donatus was indispensible, but this authority had to be recast into the authority of grammar per se. By expounding Donatus' doctrines in detail and by giving rationale for Donatus' grammatical descriptions, early medieval grammarians attempted to make Latin grammatical works transmitted from Antiquity an objective tool for learning the language. The use of dialectical concepts in the analysis of the definitions of the parts of speech and the etymological explanation of grammatical terms became the main tools in Donatian commentaries. The infiltration of dialectical notions into the grammatical description is also strongly shown in the popular school textbooks of that period, i.e. medieval parsing grammars.