Martianus Capella

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Martianus Minneus Felix Capella was a pagan writer of Late Antiquity, the founder of the trivium and quadrivium categories that structured Early Medieval education. According to Cassiodorus, Capella was a native of Madaura—which had been the native city of Apuleius—in the Roman province of Africa, and appears to have practiced as a jurist at Carthage.

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[edit] Biography

His career flourished some time during the fifth century: Martianus composed his one famous book, fundamental in the history of education, the history of rhetoric and the history of science,[1] between the sack of Rome by Alaric I (410), which he mentions, but apparently before the conquest of Africa by the Vandals in 429. As early as the middle of the sixth century, Securus Memor Felix, a professor of rhetoric, received the text in Rome, for his personal subscription at the end of book I or book II in many manuscripts records that he was working "from most corrupt exemplars".

This single curious encyclopedic work, Satyricon, or De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii et de septem Artibus liberalibus libri novem ("On the Wedding of Philology and Mercury and of the Seven Liberal Arts, in nine books"), is an elaborate didactic allegory written in a mixture of prose and elaborately allusive verse, a mixture of forms in the manner of the Menippean satires of Varro. The style is wordy and involved, loaded with metaphor and bizarre expressions. The book was of stupendous importance in fixing the unchanging formulas of Academia from the Christianized Roman Empire of the fifth century until newly-available Arabic texts and the works of Aristotle became available in Western Europe in the twelfth century. These formulas included a medieval love for allegory (in particular personifications) as a means of presenting knowledge, and an attachment to the seven Liberal Arts. The book, which is thoroughly pagan in culture and makes no allusion to Christianity, continued to shape European education during the early medieval period and through the Carolingian renaissance. "No one now is interested in what he says about his subjects," Maurice P. Cunningham observed in 1977, "except for the light his work throws on what men in other times and places knew or thought it was important to know about the artes liberales.[2] Martianus Capella can best be understood in terms of the— largely undeserved[3]— reputation of his book.

The book, embracing in resumé form the narrowed classical culture of his time, was dedicated to his son. Its frame story in the first two books relates the courtship and wedding of Mercury (intelligent or profitable pursuit), who has been refused by Wisdom, Divination and the Soul, with the maiden Philologia (learning, but literally "word-lore") who is made immortal, under the protection of the gods, the Muses, the Cardinal Virtues and the Graces. The title refers to the allegorical union of the intellectually profitable pursuit (Mercury) of learning by way of the art of letters (Philology). Among the wedding gifts are seven maids who will be Philologia's slaves: they are the seven Liberal Arts: Grammar, Dialectic, Rhetoric, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and (musical) Harmony. Art herself gives an exposition of the principles of the science she governs. Finally night has come. Architecture and Medicine are present at the feast, but as they care for nothing but earthly things, they are condemned to remain silent. Harmony escorts the bride to the bridal chamber, where nuptial songs are sung.

The remaining seven books contain expositions of the seven liberal arts, representing the sum of human knowledge. Book 3 deals with grammar, book 4 with dialectics, book 5 with rhetoric, book 6 with geometry, book 7 with arithmetic, book 8 with astronomy, book 9 with music. These abstract discussions are linked on to the original allegory by the device of personifying each science as a courtier of Mercury and Philologia. The work was a complete encyclopedia of the liberal culture of the time, and was in high repute during the Middle Ages as a school text. The author's chief sources were Varro, Pliny the Elder, Solinus, Aquila Romanus, and Aristides Quintilianus. His prose resembles that of Apuleius (also a native of Madaura), but is even more difficult. The verse portions, on the whole correct and classically constructed, are in imitation of Varro.

The eighth book describes a version of the geocentric model of astronomy in which Mercury and Venus orbit the sun. This view of Capella's was singled out for praise by Copernicus in Book I of his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.

Allegory and labored metaphor[4] utterly dominate, and the personifications are purely mechanical. Each book is an abstract or a compilation from earlier authors. The treatment of the subjects belongs to a tradition which goes back to Varro's Disciplinae, even to Varro's passing allusion to architecture and medicine, which in Martianus Capella's day were mechanics' arts, material for clever slaves, but not for senators. The classical Roman curriculum, which was to pass— largely through Martianus Capella's book— into the early medieval period, modified but scarcely revolutionized by Christianity, was limited to rhetoric and its accompanying arts, treating philosophy merely as a matter of dialectics, a focus which served equally in public or ecclesiastical education, which were increasingly becoming one and the same. Even Augustine mentions architecture and medicine as distinct from the other liberal arts. C. S. Lewis, in his The Allegory of Love, states that "the universe, which has produced the bee-orchid and the giraffe, has produced nothing stranger than Martianus Capella." In the ninth century, the dates of the earliest surviving manuscripts of the Wedding of Philiology and Mercury, glosses and comentaries on Martianus were produced by the so-called "Dunchad", Johannes Scotus Eriugena and Remigius of Auxerre. The best manuscripts were not produced in Benedictine scriptoria but in the cathedral schools and the Carolingian palace schools.[5]

In the eleventh century the German monk Notker Labeo translated the first two books into Old High German. The encyclopedia of human knowledge remained in early medieval days very much as it had been represented to be by Martianus Capella, until the age of the School of Chartres, Scholasticism and the new encyclopedic knowledge of Thomas Aquinas. As early as the end of the fifth century, another African, Fulgentius, composed a work modeled on it. About 534, its dense and convoluted text had already become hopelessly corrupted by scribal errors, according to a note, found in numerous manuscripts, by a certain rhetorician Securus Felix, who was intending to produce an edition.[6] Another sixth century writer, Gregory of Tours, tells that it became virtually a school manual.[7] It was commented upon copiously: by John Scotus Erigena, Hadoard, Alexander Neckham, and Remi of Auxerre.

The work was edited by Franciscus Vitalis Bodianus and first printed in Vicenza, 1499; its comparatively late date in print, and the modest number of later editions[8] are a marker of its slide in popularity, save as an elementary educational primer in the liberal arts.[9] The modern introduction is William Harris Stahl, Richard Johnson and E. L. Burge, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, Vol. 1: The Quadrivium of Martianus Capella: Latin Traditions in the Mathematical Sciences 50 B.C.-A.D. 1250 (Columbia University Press: Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies, 84) 1971.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Notably in keeping alive Heraclides' notions of the heliocentric motions of Mercury and Venus. (William H. Stahl, "To a Better Understanding of Martianus Capella" Speculum 40.1 (January 1965, pp. 102-115) p. 102.
  2. ^ Cunningham in a review of William Harris Stahl, Richard Johnson and E. L. Burge, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, Vol. 1: The Quadrivium of Martianus Capella: Latin Traditions in the Mathematical Sciences 50 B.C.-A.D. 1250 (Columbia University Press: Records of Civilization: Sources and Studies, 84) 1971, for Classical Philology (72.1 (January 1977, pp. 79-80) p. 80.
  3. ^ "The most eludicating approach to Martianus is through his fortuna. (Stahl 1965:105).
  4. ^ "He has the imagination of a writer of a school pageant," Maurice P. Cunningham remarked in reviewing Stahl et al. 1971 and Stahl observed (1971:ix) "the work has rarely been read in its entirety in modern times except by its editors"
  5. ^ Claudio Leonardi, I Codici di Marziano Capella 1959, reprinted from long articles in Aevum)
  6. ^ Stahl 1965:104.
  7. ^ "Our Martianus has instructed us in the seven disciplines" (History of the Franks X, 449, 14)
  8. ^ One, edited and emended by a sixteen-year-old Hugo Grotius, is a tour de force, "one of the more prodigious feats of Latin scholarship", as it was noted by Stahl 1965:104.
  9. ^ Stahl 1965:102.

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[edit] See also

[edit] External links

"Martianus Capella" in the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia..