Paul Vinhage (Cornell University)

"Which Came First, the Letter or the Sound? Grammatical Theory and Practice in the Early Middle Ages"

This lecture will trace the trajectory of grammatical theory and practice concerning vocal utterances (voces) and their written signs (literae) from Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. Elite writers, readers, and speakers of Latin in Antiquity shared a highly regulated, yet living and native, linguistic community. Grammarians of this period were keen to note changes in pronunciation, and by extension orthography. The relation between pronunciation and orthography during antiquity was largely transparent and uncontested: letters were used to encode sound in a one-to-one relationship. In this system, the primary phenomenon of speech constitutes the ground upon which letters are based; the basic equation of letter to sound, however, breaks down in the late sixth century, when Cassiodorus composes his De orthographia for his bewildered monks, who can neither pronounce what they read, nor write what they hear. By the late eighth century, orthography and pronunciation had diverged even more. To regulate and control the production of written and spoken Latin, scribes and scholars in the Carolingian court, including Alcuin and Peter of Pisa, produced novel technical apparatus within manuscripts. The technics of Latin grammatical manuscripts resituate letters as the source of vocal utterance. Regulated, grammatical speech becomes a kind of reading or writing from an exemplar stored on the page or in the mind. Through an examination of grammatical tracts from the ninth century, this lecture explores the theoretical and practical concerns of early medieval grammarians, who grounded their discipline in written letters rather than spoken sound.

Paul Vinhage is a postdoctoral associate with the Medieval Studies Program and describer of manuscripts. In August 2022 he defended his dissertation, “Scribal Technics in the Early Middle Ages,” at Cornell University. He also holds a Diploma in Manuscript Studies from the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies. He is currently working on an edition of an anonymous commentary of Donatus’ Ars minor found in Valenciennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 413. With Thomas Sawyer, he is publishing a translation with commentary of “Michael of Cornwall’s First Invective against Henry of Avranches” in the 2023 issue of The Journal of Medieval Latin.

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The Cornell Medieval Studies Program presents a series of lectures on a wide range of medieval topics. All lectures take place on Tuesdays at 4:45pm.

Cosponsored by the Society for the Humanities