"Grammar" "School"—Part 2 of 2

Yesterday we looked at the use of the word "school" in the Middle Ages. Today, let's look at the descriptive term "grammar" when applied to schools.

There is a document from the late 11th century that refers to a scola grammatice [grammatic/grammar school]. We see that and similar phrases becoming more common in the 1200s. In 1387 we get the first reference in English to a "gramer scole" by John of Trevisa (briefly mentioned here), who is translating Ralph Higden's Polychronicon* and uses the phrase to refer to a school in Alexandria.

But what did they mean by "grammar" school? Was it all just about teaching grammar. Well, in a word, probably "yes." The term grew to distinguish those schools from the more involved curriculum of the schools that were tackling the seven Liberal Arts—Grammar, Rhetoric and Logic made up the foundational "Trivium" while the higher learning of the Quadrivium meant studying Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy. (The first three were all about mastering language, the four were all about mastering mathematics.)

What was covered in "grammar" schools? Well, it was synonymous with what a later age called the study of "letters," and comprised learning from great writings. Grammar school was all about reading great literature from the past and committing the lessons found therein to heart. One learned how the great writers—who could on rare occasions be pagan writers, but were mostly the Church Fathers, as well as the Latin Bible—constructed their brilliant sentences and built their arguments.

Of course, these great minds of the past did not write in English, and so the study of "grammar" could not truly be undertaken until one learned Latin. For young boys beginning instruction—usually at a nearby church under the tutelage of a priest—the first stage was learning Latin.

Latin grammar had been dissected and discussed at great length by scholars in the past, particularly by two Latin writers named Priscian and Donat. But let's save them for tomorrow.

*This work was an attempt to write a universal history, hence the name meaning "many times."

The Antipodes

As the unknown becomes close and familiar, imagination must seek new realms further away. Modern fiction doesn't write about alien life on the Moon or Mars or Venus, since we now "know" those spheres. In the Middle Ages, it was assumed that fantastical lands and creatures existed "over there." As far lands such as Africa, for instance, began to be explored and found mundane, the fantastical was mentally placed in a more distant spot.

The Antipodes (literally "opposite feet": the place on the globe directly opposite to where you are standing)* fascinated the Middle Ages for both philosophical and geographical reasons. On the one hand, the idea had come to them from the Classical World, and so was difficult to dismiss. This was the place that held creatures out of legend: Cyclopes, dog-headed men, Sciopods whose single large foot could be used as an umbrella when they lay on their backs, Blemmyae with faces on their torsos. On the other hand, the Medieval idea of symmetry demanded that there be lands to the far south, balancing the known lands in the north. Especially as the idea of earth's roundness took shape, Africa wasn't enough to satisfactorily balance Europe and Asia.

The Antipodes were also a natural extension of the theory of "zones." Since it became very cold up north, and hotter as you went south, it was assumed that the temperate zone enjoyed by most of Europe had a counterpart below the equator which was equally inhabitable. Below that, of course would be the area that is opposite the Arctic: the Anti-Arctic, or Antarctic.

The term was first used by Plato in his Timaeus. It was first used in English in 1398 in John of Trevisa's translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus' De Proprietatibus Rerum (On the Order of Things):

Yonde in Ethiopia ben the Antipodes, men that haue theyr fete ayenst our fete.
(Yonder in Ethiopia are the Antipodes, men that have their fete against our feet.)

Some in the Middle Ages used the image of upside-down men as a reason to reject the Earth as a globe and opt for a flat Earth. Plato had addressed this himself, however, in an assumption of orientation that he does not call gravity but that works the same way:

For if there were any solid body in equipoise at the centre of the universe, there would be nothing to draw it to this extreme rather than to that, for they are all perfectly similar; and if a person were to go round the world in a circle, he would often, when standing at the antipodes of his former position, speak of the same point as above and below; for, as I was saying just now, to speak of the whole which is in the form of a globe as having one part above and another below is not like a sensible man.

But sensible men apparently did not read the Timaeus, or never grasped the concept of "up" and "down" being relative to where you were standing. A universally accepted map of the world was unknown; maps of the world typically took one of four forms, which we will look at tomorrow.

*Have fun finding your antipodal point here.