Alexander de Villa Dei

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Alexander de Villa Dei in Hartmann Schedel's world chronicle from 1493.

Alexander de Villa Dei (also Alexander Gallus ; * around 1170 in Villedieu-les-Poêles , Normandy ; † unknown) was a French canon and author of a rhyming grammar.

Life

Alexander studied in Paris and later taught in Dol-de-Bretagne . He was canon in Avranches and is best known as the author of a Latin didactic poem, the Doctrinale , which he completed around the year 1200. The work, written in Leonine hexameters , provides (based on Donat and Priscian ) basic knowledge of Latin grammar :

  1. Regular declination (vv. 29–363)
  2. Irregular declination (vv. 364–457)
  3. Comparison of adjectives (vv. 458–498)
  4. The grammatical genera (vv. 499–693)
  5. Perfect and supine stems (vv. 694–949)
  6. Incomplete and irregular verbs (vv. 950-1047)
  7. Formation of verbs through affixes (vv. 1048-1073)
  8. Administration of the case (vv. 1074-1368)
  9. Sentence construction (vv. 1369–1549)
  10. Prosody and metrics (vv. 1550–2281)
  11. Word accent (vv. 2282–2360)
  12. Rhetorical figures (vv. 2361–2641)

In addition to the Doctrinal , Alexander wrote numerous other writings, including a. the Ecclesiale (a kind of Christian counterpart to Ovid's Fasti ) and the Computus ecclesiasticus (which deals with the calculation of ecclesiastical festivals).

Entry in Schedel's world chronicle of 1493

Alexander de Villa Dei has his own short entry including a portrait in Hartmann Schedel's World Chronicle of 1493, a kind of encyclopedia of the late Middle Ages:

"Alexander de villa dei a lerer of the holy writes. sant Benedicten (literally sant Franciscen) ordens even wrote a useful book for the pupils and wrote it in three tayl. and so looks to Scribere clericulis etc. "

(Alexander de Villa Dei: a teacher of the Holy Scriptures, belonged to the order of the Benedictines (some also think of the Franciscans), wrote a useful book for the students at that time and divided it into three parts. [...])

Fonts

Edition

  • Dietrich Reichling (Ed.): The Doctrinale of Alexander de Villa-Dei. Critical-exegetical edition with introduction, list of manuscripts and prints, together with registers. Berlin 1893; Reprint Leipzig without year (= Monumenta Germaniae Paedagogica. Volume 12); Reprint (of the 1893 edition) Franklin Books, New York 1974 (= Studies in the history of education. Volume 11). ISBN 0-8337-2920-9 .

literature

  • Reinhold F. Glei : Alexander de Villa Dei (approx. 1170–1250), Doctrinale. In: Wolfram Ax (ed.): Latin teachers in Europe. Fifteen portraits from Varro to Erasmus of Rotterdam. Böhlau, Cologne 2005, ISBN 3-412-14505-X , pp. 291-312

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. The frequently mentioned date 1250 is speculation.
  2. ^ Friedrich Winterhager : Latin lessons for nuns in the Ebstorf monastery around 1490 under the influence of the Bursfeld reform movement. In: Medical historical messages. Journal for the history of science and specialist prose research. Volume 34, 2015 (2016), pp. 79–85, here: p. 83.
  3. Hartmann Schedel: Weltchronik 1493. Colored and commented complete edition , introduction and commentary by Stephan Füssel, Augsburg 2004, ISBN 3-8289-0803-9 .