The Literary Genres: The Commentary

The form in which teaching was done is reflected in the method of composing philosophic texts from the beginning of the Carolingian period: the reading and commentary (lectio) of an authoritative text constitutes the principal form of written production starting from the 9th-10th c. In the 12th c., the increase of the textual patrimony and the revival of a teaching method based on ancient texts rather than on early medieval compendia, favored the creation of the literary genre known as the commentary. The simple gloss (an explanation of difficult terminology or a brief note on particularly important passages of the original text) is substituted by a textual analysis done phrase by phrase and integrated, in the places most important or difficult, with long digressions and questions. This method facilitates the presentation of various levels of interpretation, gathering together all the different readings of a text, of which the most renown example is the ‘four senses’ of the Bible: literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical (B. Smalley). The text used during the lessons could be written down in the form of a commentary by the master himself or by one or more of the students: in this last case—frequent in the university environment—we have the so-called reportatio. The complexity of this new way of incorporating tradition made it necessary to clarify the methodological criteria through an articulate introduction (accessus ad auctores) which explains the purpose and modality of the commentary, while the discussions developed around juridical problems in the 11th and 12th c. and the reflection on the problematic aspects of theological texts gradually accentuated the importance of the quaestio method. The dimension of orality, which increases the importance of memory, remained for the entire Middle Ages a key aspect of teaching and learning, also due to the fact that producing written copies of texts required time and expenses. Beginning in the 13th c., however, the universities promoted a quicker and more economic way of producing the texts that constituted the school curriculum: copies were made by specialized scribes (stationarii), to each of whom a single part of the text (called pecia) was entrusted to be reproduced in a small series; the various parts of the text, each copied in a series by different copyists, were then put back together to form more copies of the entire text. Besides these books, teachers and students used manuscripts with other useful instruments: anthologies of quotations, compendia and manuals which schematically presented the essential information of the curriculum, glossaries.