Johannes de Garlandia (philologist)

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This page is about the grammarian. For the musicologist see Johannes de Garlandia (music theorist).

Johannes de Garlandia (fl. c. 1205 - 1255) was a philologist and university teacher. Said to be of English origin and to have studied at Oxford, he later studied at the medieval University of Paris. He was present at the siege of Toulouse in 1218, when Simon de Montfort was killed. He later returned to teach at Paris. John Bale in his Catalogus, and John Pits, following Bale, placed him among the writers of the 11th century. The main facts of his life, however, are stated in a long poem De triumphis ecclesiae contained in Cotton MS. Claudius A x in the British Museum, and edited by Thomas Wright for the Roxburghe Club in 1856.

In 1229 he was one of the first Masters of the new University of Toulouse. His poem Epithalamium Beatae Mariae Virginis was presented in 1230 to the Papal legate Romanus de Sancto Angelo, one of the founders of the university. He remained in Toulouse during the Albigensian Crusade, which he describes in De Triumphis. After the death of bishop Foulques of Toulouse in 1231 the Cathars regained influence at Toulouse, university teachers ceased to be paid and many considered it too dangerous to remain in the city. Johannes de Garlandia was one of those who escaped, disguising himself as a serf or slave.

He returned to Paris, where Roger Bacon heard him lecture. He was still there in 1245-1252, writing his autobiographical poem De triumphis ecclesiae (On the Triumphs of the Church). The rest of his life was spent in Paris, where he finished his poem in 1252.

Garland's grammatical works were much used in England, and were often printed by Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde. He was also a voluminous Latin poet. The best known of his poems beside the De Triumphis Ecclesiae is Epithalamium beatae Mariae Virginis, contained in the same manuscript. Among his other works are his Dictionarius, a Latin vocabulary, printed by T. Wright in the Library of National Antiquities (vol. i., 1857); Compendium totius grammatices printed at Deventer, 1489; and two metrical treatises, entitled Synonyma and Equivoca, frequently printed at the close of the 15th century. A treatise on alchemy, Compendium alchimiae, often printed under his name, was by a 14th-century writer named Martin Ortolan, or Lortholain.

[edit] Works

Ars versificatoria
Compendium totius grammatices
De Triumphis Ecclesiae
Dictionarius
Epithalamium beatae Mariae Virginis
Equivoca
Integumenta Ovidii
Morale scolarium
Synonyma

[edit] Bibliography

F. Ghisalberti, editor, Integumenta Ovidii. Messina, Milan, 1933.
A. GRONDEUX, E. MARGUIN, 'L’œuvre grammaticale de Jean de Garlande (ca 1195-1272 ?), auteur, réviseur et glosateur: un bilan' in Histoire Epistémologie Langage vol. 21 (1999) pp. 133-163.
Frédérique Lachaud, 'La première description des métiers de Paris: le Dictionarius de Jean de Garlande (vers 1220-1230)' in Espaces, acteurs et structures de la consommation en milieu urbain au Moyen Âge (special issue of Revue d’Histoire Urbaine, due 2006).
L. J. Paetow, editor, Morale scolarium. University of California Press, 1927.
F. J. E. Raby, A History of Christian-Latin Poetry (1927) p. 386 ff.
E. F. Wilson, "The Georgica Spiritualia of John of Garland" in Speculum vol. 8 (1933) p. 358 ff.
Wright, Thomas, editor (1856), Johannis de Garlandia De triumphis ecclesiae, London: Nichols

For further bibliographical information see the British Museum catalogue; J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infimae aetatis vol. iii. (1754); G. Brunet, Manuel du libraire, &c. See also Histoire litt. de la France, vols. viii., xxi., xxiii. and xxx.; the prefaces to the editions by T. Wright mentioned above; P. Meyer, La Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois, vol. ii. pp. xxi-xxiii. (Paris, 1875); A. Scheler, Lexicographie latine du XII et du XIII siecles (Leipzig, 1867); the article by C. L. Kingsford in the Dict. Nat. Biog., giving a list also of the works on alchemy, mathematics and music, rightly or wrongly ascribed to him; and Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol. i. (1906) 549. This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.