Ebook: Donatus Anglice : Ælfric’s Grammar and the making of the English language [thesis]

Ælfric's Grammar was the Old English best-seller of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Sisam notes, "no other book in Anglo-Saxon approaches [the Grammar] in the number of copies that survive" (301). We have fourteen complete or partial copies of the Grammar, along with two transcriptions of a fifteenth that has disappeared. In comparison, we have only six copies (including two fragments) of the Old English translation of Bede's Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, six copies of the West Saxon translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care, and, of course, only one Beowulf.

In spite of the work's medieval popularity, modem Anglo-Saxon scholars have largely overlooked the Grammar. Scholarship on Ælfric's work instead concentrates primarily on the homilies; Wilcox, like most Ælfrician scholars, sees Ælfric primarily as a writer of homilies, introducing Ælfric as "the most important homilist in Anglo-Saxon England" (1) and stating, "At the heart of Ælfric's achievement is the writing of homilies" (15). To some extent, the lack of scholarly interest in the Grammar stems from the nature of the text; grammar textbooks do not always make fun reading. But scholars who ignore the Grammar are neglecting a seminal text in the history of the English language. In this text, Ælfricus Grammaticus creates the field of English linguistics, writing a grammatical analysis of the language suitable for beginning students. He does so in order to provide those students with the tools necessary to interpret English texts such as his homilies.

Chapter one of this dissertation illustrates the two English traditions out of which Ælfric writes: Alfred's nationalistic translation and education project, as described in the Preface to the West Saxon translation of Gregory's Pastoral Care, and Æthelwold's school at Winchester, which promoted Standard Old English and possibly education in the vernacular for religious purposes. Chapter two looks carefully at Ælfric's two prefaces to the Grammar. In these prefaces Ælfric claims that this work teaches two languages, “utramque linguam, uidelicet latinam et anglicam," and associates the teaching of English grammar with the promotion of religious learning.

Chapter three shows how Ælfric's Grammar functions as a grammar of English. Modem readers of the Grammar do not recognize the text as a grammar of English because their expectations of a medieval grammar are shaped by their impressions of grammars used to teach Latin as a second language. In this chapter I show how Ælfric describes English, discussing the properties of the parts of speech using English examples and dividing English words into semantic categories. Chapter four addresses the question of why Ælfric, an author interested in promoting religious belief, wrote this grammar of English. As he states in his English preface to the Grammar, Ælfric believes that grammar is the "key" to understanding texts; he teaches English grammar in order to give readers the proper interpretative tools to understand English-language texts. Ælfric's Grammar, then, teaches basic English literary criticism in the tradition of Latin grammatica.

Chapter five is a discussion of the implications of ^lfric's dual­ language texts on our ideas about medieval literacy. I argue that a neat bifurcation of the medieval world into one oral, lay, and English culture opposed to one written, clerical, and Latin culture is impossible. In chapter six I look at a specific manuscript of the Grammar, British Museum, Cotton Faustina A. x., which contains Anglo-Norman glosses in the section on verb conjugation. The Anglo-Norman readers of the text saw the Grammar as a grammar of English. More significantly, one glossator uses Ælfric's paradigms of English and Latin as a template for his own French grammar and Ælfric's English grammatical terminology as a model for French terminology. The appendix describes known sources and provenances for the surviving Grammar manuscripts.

The title of this dissertation, "Donatus Anglice," comes from a title in one manuscript of the Grammar and two references to the Grammar in medieval book lists. In the fifth century, Donatus wrote a grammar that became the standard introductory grammar text in Western Europe for the next thousand years. Because of the omnipresence of this text, the name donatus (or donatum or donat) came to refer to any introductory text. The name Donatus Anglice, then, is especially appropriate for Ælfric's Grammar. Ælfric's Grammar is an English Donatus, our first introduction to the grammar of the English language. Mfric's Grammar does for English what Donatus's Ars grammatica does for Latin; it shows students the grammatical structure of their language and teaches them how to analyze texts in that language. Ælfric's Grammar, Donatus Anglice, makes English a language by recognizing that English is a language, a construct with a grammatical structure that can be analyzed with the same tools used to analyze Latin.