Book Description

Grammatical description and instruction have left their enduring imprint on European scholarship and culture. For more than twenty centuries, grammar has been the cornerstone of humanist education, and has been transmitted continuously, albeit in changing - chronologically, geographically, politically, and institutionally - contexts. The papers in this volume document the transmission, adaptation and re-elaboration of grammar, since Antiquity, by focusing on its foundational concepts and techniques. The vectors of these processes of transmission and adaptation are texts, and behind these texts, we can reconstruct networks of interaction: between teachers and students, between scholars and models of description, and - as the overarching dynamics - the dialogue between the members of the "virtual community" interested in the study of language. The seventeen papers of this volume have been arranged into six sections: "Grammar: The Fate of a Cultural Discipline"; "The Origins of Linguistic Reflection in Ancient Greece"; "Ancient Greek grammar: Theorization and Practice"; "Latin Grammar in Antiquity and the Low Middle Ages: Heritage and Innovation"; "Renaissance Grammar and Rhetoric: The Encounter between Classical Languages and the Vernaculars"; "Philological Deposits of Ancient Latin Grammars"). The volume is rounded off with detailed indices (Index of names; Index of Greek, Latin, and Latinized technical terms; Index of concepts).