L'Ars Riuipullensis: un commento al De partibus orationis di Donato

My research project consists in the development of the critical edition of the unpublished Ars Riuipullensis, a grammatical treatise which qualifies as a commentary on the section De partibus orationis of the Ars grammatica by Donatus, namely on the Ars minor and on the Ars maior’s second book. The work is transmitted by two witnesses: the MS Barcelona, Archivo de la Corona de Aragón, Ripoll 46 (written during the first half of the Xth century in the Monastery of Santa Maria de Ripoll, in Catalonia); the MS Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. lat. 3318 (written in the second half of the Xth century in southern France). Written in France between the end of the IXth and the beginning of the Xth century under the influence of the Insular pedagogy on the Continent, the work deals with the eight parts of speech; a chapter is devoted to each of these parts, starting from Ars Minor by Donatus and reproducing the same textual approach: indeed, the narrative buildup is per interrogationem et responsionem, meant as a continuous dialogue between the disciple, who asks questions, and the teacher, who replies, providing his knowledge. In structural terms, the Ars Riuipullensis appears to be a “patchwork”, which brings together excerpta taken from different authors, towards which the anonymous writer shows to adopt a “scissors-and-paste” approach: as a matter of fact, the character of the teacher proves to be mechanical and impersonal, and his text ends up being a compilation based on the “copy and paste” of the works by previous artigraphs, whose grammatical doctrine is reproduced.