Grammar and Grammarians in the Early Middle Ages

One of the most pressing linguistic problems of the early Middle Ages was to determine how Latin, first introduced into the British Isles and other parts of Northern Europe as the language of the Christian church and Roman civilization, could be taught as a foreign language. Vivien Law documents the conceptual shift needed to convert the standard grammatical works of the late Roman empire, naturally orientated towards the needs of native speakers, into descriptive pedagogical grammars.

Having examined the nature of the cultural transfer involved in this process, the author turns to the Carolingian rediscovery of Aristotle's works on logic and the consequential reorientation of linguistic scholarship towards the relationship between language and thought. Subsequent chapters deal with other major issues and topics of the period, including the question of language and authority, Aelfric's bilingual grammar, the first grammar of Latin to use the vernacular (Old English), the visual representation of word structure in manuscripts, and medieval grammatical terminology.