The Emergence of Divergent text Traditions of Manuel Álvares’ De Institvtione Grammatica Libri Tres in 16th century Europe

Abstract

Following the first edition of Manuel Álvares’ De institutione grammatica libri tres (Lisbon, 1572), the Portuguese text tradition of the celebrated grammar was completed with the 1573 pupil’s manual. Both the precise number of editions that appeared thereafter and what in a distant future might be developed into a stemma editionum remain unknown. In the context of ongoing bibliographic research, the present article offers an outlook on the beginnings of Alvaresian grammar in late 16th-century Europe by means of a presentation of how the grammars’ national text traditions emerged in Czech, French, German, Italian, Lithuanian, Polish and Spanish editions. Álvares’ grammar started to take on divergent national forms since its first publication for the purposes of the Bavarian Jesuit University of Dillingen, in which the volumes were distributed according to the official syllabus, thus moving beyond the division between teacher’s manual and pupil’s manual made by the author. Even though the more comprehensive ars maior also appeared in German and Italian editions, in the late 16th century the ars minor became particularly important due to its editions in France, Italy and Spain. There also appeared the Czech variant of the ars minor as well as the Lithuanian and Polish partial editions, whose textual constitution seems to correspond to the requirements of the respective syllabi.