"Ad dandam doctrinam vulgaris provincialis": Chansonnier P and the Medieval Latin Curriculum in Italy

Perhaps one of the most remarkable traits of the Italian-made MS Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Pluteus 41.42, commonly referred to as chansonnier P, is its pedagogical focus. Copied by an Italian scribe, Pietro Berzoli of Gubbio, MS P contains the two first known grammar texts to treat a Romance vernacular: Uc Faidit's Donatz proensals and Raimon Vidal's Razos de trobar (Swiggers 135-7). In addition to its two grammars, MS P contains an Occitan-Italian glossary; a section containing prose biographies of the troubadours and commentaries on individual poems, commonly referred to as vidas and razos; an anthology of individual stanzas drawn from troubadour lyrics, known as coblas; and a collection of troubadour lyric poems. Together with the extensive verb lists of the Donatz and its dictionary of rhymes, these accompanying literary and pedagogical components of MS P supply the Italian reader of the manuscript with virtually all of the tools needed to understand the poetry of the troubadours. The Donatz and the Razos de trobar, with their sections on morphology and syntax, give instruction on understanding the language of the troubadours; the Occitan-Italian dictionary serves as a reference for looking up difficult or unknown words in Old Occitan; the vidas and razos provide background materials on the lives and poems of the troubadours; and the section of coblas furnishes the student of troubadour poetry with short, memorizable examples of Occitan lyric poetry to be imitated or recited. To any aspiring student of the Old Occitan vernacular, MS P is, as one Italian scholar describes it, a "bona fide Introductory Manual to Provençal Studies" (Cingolani 113).¹

In this article I will briefly examine the particularly pedagogical character of MS P, paying special attention to its focus on foreign language pedagogy. Because Old Occitan would have been a foreign language for an Italian audience, MS P provides its reader with many, if not all, of the tools necessary for understanding the language of the troubadours. However, because Occitan would not have been immediately comprehensible to the average Italian, MS P assumes at least the rudiments of Latin education on the part of its reader in order to effectively teach Old Occitan as a foreign language. Through a brief study of MS P's grammatical and rhetorical components and their function in relation to the medieval Latin curriculum, I intend to demonstrate how MS P's reliance on Latin pedagogical structures would have granted a Latin-educated Italian audience access to the culture and poetry of the troubadours by the only means available: the Occitan vernacular.

The two grammatical treatises compiled in MS P rely to a great extent on the framework of Latin grammar instruction to teach Old Occitan to their foreign audiences. This is not surprising, considering that the prevalent model for foreign language instruction available to a vernacular grammarian at the time would have been found in Latin grammar schools and their textbooks. And because the Donatz and the Razos de trobar are the first grammars to be written on a Romance vernacular, their authors did not have (to our knowledge) any vernacular predecessors to imitate. Therefore, when Uc Faidit and Raimon Vidal sought a structure for understanding Old Occitan grammar, they turned to Latin grammar books of their day, especially those based on the Ars minor of Aelius Donatus and the Institutiones grammaticae of Priscian.

The Donatz proensals was written around 1240 by Uc Faidit, who has been identified with the Occitan-born, expatriate troubadour Uc de Saint-Circ.² According to the epilogue of the Donatz preserved on folio 28v in MS A (Biblioteca Laurenziana, Aedilium 187), Faidit composed his book "ad dandam doctrinam vulgaris provincialis et ad dissernendum verum a falso in dicto vulgare" ('to give instruction on vernacular Provençal and to distinguish between proper and improper usage³ in vernacular speech'; Marshall, Donatz 255). From the epilogue, we know that Faidit's grammar was intended for two Italian noblemen, and we also know that he could assume that these two noblemen would have been at least familiar "with...