Martianus Capella
Martianus Minneus Felix Capella (fl. c. 410–420) was a
.His single encyclopedic work, verse.
Martianus often presents philosophical views based on Neoplatonism, the Platonic school of philosophy pioneered by Plotinus and his followers.[5]
Like his near-contemporary Macrobius, who also produced a major work on classical Roman religion, Martianus never directly identifies his own religious affiliation. Much of his work occurs in the form of dialogue, and the views of the interlocutors may not represent the author's own.[6]
Life
According to
Martianus was active during the 5th century, writing after the sack of Rome by Alaric I in 410, which he mentions, but apparently before the conquest of North Africa by the Vandals in 429.[7]
As early as the middle of the 6th 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". Gerardus Vossius erroneously took this to mean that Martianus was himself active in the 6th century, giving rise to a long-standing misconception about Martianus's dating.[8]
The lunar crater Capella is named after him.
De nuptiis
This single encyclopedic work, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii ("On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury"), sometimes called De septem disciplinis ("On the seven disciplines") or the Satyricon,[9] is an elaborate didactic allegory written in a mixture of prose and elaborately allusive verse, a prosimetrum 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 great importance in defining the standard formula of academic learning from the Christianized Roman Empire of the fifth century until the Renaissance of the 12th century. This formula included a medieval love for allegory (in particular personifications) as a means of presenting knowledge, and a structuring of that learning around the seven liberal arts.
The book, embracing in résumé form the narrowed classical culture of his time, was dedicated to his son. Its
Among the wedding gifts are seven maids who will be Philology's servants. They are the seven liberal arts: Grammar (an old woman with a knife for excising children's grammatical errors), Dialectic, Rhetoric (a tall woman with a dress decorated with figures of speech and armed in a fashion to harm adversaries), Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and (musical) Harmony. As each art is introduced, she gives an exposition of the principles of the science she represents, thereby providing a summary of the seven liberal arts. Two other arts, Architecture and Medicine, were present at the feast, but since they care for earthly things, they were to keep silent in the company of the celestial deities.
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
The eighth book describes a modified geocentric astronomical model, in which the Earth is at rest in the center of the universe and circled by the Moon, the Sun, three planets and the stars, while Mercury and Venus circle the Sun.[10] The view that Mercury and Venus circle the Sun was singled out as one not to "disregard" by Copernicus in Book I of his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.
Influence
Martianus Capella can best be understood in terms of the reputation of his book.[11] The work was read, taught, and commented upon throughout the early Middle Ages and shaped European education during the early medieval period and the Carolingian Renaissance.
As early as the end of the fifth century, another African,
Modern interpreters have less interest in Martianus's ideas, "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
The editio princeps of De nuptiis, edited by Franciscus Vitalis Bodianus, was printed in Vicenza in 1499. The work's comparatively late date in print, as well as the modest number of later editions,[19] is a marker of the slide in its popularity, save as an elementary educational primer in the liberal arts.[20] For many years the standard edition of the work was that of A. Dick (Teubner, 1925), but J. Willis produced a new edition for Teubner in 1983.[13]
A modern introduction, focusing on the mathematical arts, is 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.[21] Volume 2 of this work is an English translation of De nuptiis.
See also
- Allegory in the Middle Ages
- Macrobius, a contemporaneous pagan handbook compiler who offers many parallels with Martianus.
- Cassiodorus
Notes
- ^ Margaret Deanesly, A History of Early Medieval Europe: From 476–911 (New York: Routledge, 2020).
- ^ Jack Lindsay, "Introduction: Apuleius and His Work", in The Golden Ass, trans. Jack Lindsay (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1960), p. 25.
- ^ Andy Merrills and Richard Miles, The Vandals (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), p. 213.
- ^ Ian Wood, "Latin", in A Companion to Late Antique Literature, ed. Scott McGill and Edward J. Watts (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), p. 27
- ^ Danuta Shanzer, A Philosophical and Literary Commentary on Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii Book One (University of California Press, 1986), pp. 14, 136 et passim; Stahl, et al., vol. 1, p. 10.
- Alan Cameron, The Last Pagans of Rome (Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 265ff. Cameron finds it highly unlikely that a non-Christian could participate prominently in public life at this late date.
- ^ William H. Stahl, "To a Better Understanding of Martianus Capella" Speculum 40.1 (January 1965), pp. 102-115.
- ^ Parker, H. - "The Seven Liberal Arts" (The English Historical Review, vol. 5, no. 19, pp. 417-461)
- ^ On the title see William Stahl, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts, vol. 1, pp. 21-22.
- ^ Bruce S. Eastwood, Ordering the Heavens: Roman Astronomy and Cosmology in the Carolingian Renaissance (Leiden: Brill, 2007), pp. 238-9.
- ^ "The most elucidating approach to Martianus is through his fortuna (Stahl 1965, p. 105).
- ^ Stahl 1965, p. 104.
- ^ a b c Winterbottom, "Martianus Capella" in Texts and Transmission: A Survey of the Latin Classics, edited by L. D. Reynolds (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 245.
- ^ "Our Martianus has instructed us in the seven disciplines" (History of the Franks X, 449, 14.)
- ^ For a digital edition of the glosses in Carolingian manuscripts of Martianus Capella, see Teeuwen (2008) and Isépy & Posselt (2010).
- ^ "Victorius of Aquitaine. Martianus Capella. Remigius of Auxerre. Gregory the Great". World Digital Library. Retrieved 2014-06-03.
- ^ Stephen C. McCluskey, Astronomies and Cultures in Early Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1999), p. 159.
- ^ M. P. Cunningham, review of Stahl, Johnson and 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, in: Classical Philology vol. 72 no. 1 (January 1977, pp. 79-80) p. 80.
- ^ One, edited and emended by the sixteen-year-old Hugo Grotius, is a tour de force, "one of the more prodigious feats of Latin scholarship", as was noted by Stahl 1965, p. 104.
- ^ Stahl 1965, p. 102.
- OCLC 888835999.
References
- Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. An early version of this article was based on it.
- "Martianus Capella" in Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
- P. Wessner in Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaften 1930.
- M. Cappuyns, in Dictionnaire d'histoire et de géographie ecclésiastique, Paris, 1949.
- Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts. New York: Columbia University Press 1971.
- Vol. 1: The quadrivium of Martianus Capella. Latin traditions in the mathematical sciences, 50 B.C.–A.D. 1250, by William Harris Stahl, 1971.
- Vol. 2: The marriage of Philology and Mercury, translated by William Harris Stahl and R. Johnson, with E. L. Burge, 1977.
- M. Ferré, Martianus Capella. Les noces de Philologie et de Mercure. Livre IV: la dialectique, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2007.
- B. Ferré, Martianus Capella. Les noces de Philologie et de Mercure. Livre VI: la géométrie, Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2007.
- J.-Y. Guillaumin, Martianus Capella. Les noces de Philologie et de Mercure. Livre VII: l'arithmétique, Paris, Les Belles Lettres, 2003.
- De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (book 9 only).
- Konrad Vössing, "Augustinus und Martianus Capella - ein Diskurs im Spätantiken Karthago?", in Therese Fuhrer (hg), Die christlich-philosophischen Diskurse der Spätantike: Texte, Personen, Institutionen: Akten der Tagung vom 22.-25. Februar 2006 am Zentrum für Antike und Moderne der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Stuttgart, Franz Steiner Verlag, 2008) (Philosophie der Antike, 28),
- O’Sullivan, Sinéad, "Martianus Capella and the Carolingians: Some Observations Based on the Glosses on Books I–II from the Oldest Gloss Tradition on De nuptiis," in Elizabeth Mullins and Diarmuid Scully (eds), Listen, O Isles, unto me: Studies in Medieval Word and Image in honour of Jennifer O’Reilly (Cork, 2011), 28–38.
External links
Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company..
.- Martianus Capella (2008). Thomas Brouwer; Mariken Teeuwen (eds.). Carolingian Scholarship and Martianus Capella: The Oldest Commentary Tradition. Leiden: Huygens Instituut. Retrieved 22 November 2013.
- Martianus Capella; Remigius of Auxerre; John Scotus Eriugena (2010). Monika Isépy; Bernd Posselt (eds.). Die Glossen zu Martianus Capella im Codex 193 der Kölner Dombibliothek. Cologne: Münchner Zentrum für Editionswissenschaft. Retrieved 22 November 2013.
- Online Galleries, History of Science Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries Archived 2020-11-13 at the Wayback Machine High resolution images of works by Martianus Capella in .jpg and .tiff format.
- De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii in PDF and other formats
- Rhetores latini minores, Carl Halm (ed.), Lipsiae in aedibus B. G. Teubneri, 1863, pp. 449-492.