John of Garland: Textual Cultures and Communities of Practice

How did medieval students and teachers learn, read, and use texts in a multilingual Europe? And what can the traces they left in manuscripts tell us about the languages, educational practices, and intellectual communities of the Middle Ages?

This workshop explores these questions through the works of John of Garland, a prolific thirteenth-century author, teacher, and grammarian whose writings circulated widely across Europe. Born in England and active for much of his career in France, John taught Latin in Paris and also spent time in Toulouse and back in England. His extensive oeuvre encompasses grammar and lexicography, poetry and rhetoric, moral instruction, and allegorical interpretation. His works survive in numerous manuscripts and early printed editions, many of which contain annotations and glosses in Latin as well as vernacular languages including French, English, Dutch, German, Polish, and Czech.

Rather than considering John’s works only as the products of a single author, the workshop approaches them as sites of interaction between texts, teachers, students, and readers. The manuscripts and early prints in which his works circulated preserve traces of these diverse communities of practice and offer an exceptional opportunity to investigate medieval teaching and learning, multilingualism, textual transmission, and the reception of knowledge across Europe.

The workshop is organised by PD Dr Annina Seiler together with the research project An English Teacher in Paris: John of Garland’s Dictionarius and Medieval Language Learning