¹ Sheingorn, Pamela, “‘The Wise Mother’: The Image of St. Anne Teaching the Virgin Mary,” in Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Erler, Mary C. and Kowaleski, Maryanne (Ithaca, NY, 2003), 105–34Google Scholar; Clanchy, Michael T., “Learning to Read in the Middle Ages and the Role of Mothers,” in Studies in the History of Reading, ed. Brooks, G. and Pugh, A. K. (Reading, 1984): 33–39Google Scholar; Reinburg, Virginia, French Books of Hours: Making an Archive of Prayer, c. 1400–1600 (Cambridge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² Gary P. Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (Notre Dame, IN, 2003).

³ Capella, Martianus, Martianus Capella and the Seven Liberal Arts: The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, trans. Harris, William Stahl and Richard Johnson with E. L. Burge, vol. 2 (New York, 1977), 3. 223–326Google Scholar.

⁴ Capella, Marriage, 3. 223.

⁵ Capella, Marriage, 3. 326.

⁶ Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, 5.

⁷ Quintilian, Institutio oratoria: Books 1–3, trans. H.E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1980), 1.3. 13–18.

⁸ For a sampling of important medieval grammar theorists and helpful introductions to their work, see Copeland, Rita and Sluiter, Ineke, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475 (Oxford, 2009)Google Scholar. R. W. Hunt emphasizes “the unity of the artes,” dependent upon Grammar for advancement and on each other for a complete education. See Hunt, R. W., “Studies on Priscian I,” in The History of Grammar in the Middle Ages: Collected Papers, ed. Bursill-Hall, G. L. (Amsterdam, 1980), 30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹ For an analysis of the De doctrina’s influence and Christian thought on the uses of grammar through Bernard of Clairvaux, see Franco Simone, “La ‘Reductio Artium ad Sacram Scripturam’ quale espressione dell'Umanesimo Medievale fino al secolo XII,” Convivium n.s. 6 (1949): 887–927; and Mark Vessey, Introduction, Cassiodorus: Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning and On the Soul, trans. James W. Halporn (Liverpool, 2004), 24–38.

¹⁰ Cora E. Lutz, “Remigius’ Ideas on the Classification of the Seven Liberal Arts,” Traditio 12 (1956), 65–86 at 82.

¹¹ Grammar is, therefore, the guardian and mistress of the articulate word through her discipline. Augustine, Soliloquia 2.2.19 (PL 32, 894).

¹² On the meaning of vox articulata in Augustine, see L. G. Kelly, The Mirror of Grammar: Theology, Philosophy, and the Modistae (Amsterdam, 2002), 15.

¹³ “Grammar is the skill of speaking properly and the origin and foundation of liberal letters,” my translation. See Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, ed. W. M. Lindsay, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1911), 1.5.1.

¹⁴ On the character and quality of Isidore's etymologies, see the work of Jacques Fontaine, including “Cohérence et originalité de l’étymologie antique,” in Homenaje a Eleuterio Elorduy S.J., ed. Félix Roderiguez and Juan Iturriaga (Deusto, 1978), 113–44.

¹⁵ Valastro Canale, “Isidoro di Siviglia: La vis verbi come riflesso dell'omnipotenza divina,” Cuadernos de filología clásica 10 (1996): 147–76.

¹⁶ John of Salisbury, The Metalogicon of John of Salisbury, trans. Daniel D. McGarry (Berkeley, 1955), 37. John quotes Isidore's definition of grammar in Book 1, at the beginning of chapter 18 (52).

¹⁷ The final section of this article will deal with Lady Grammar's birch rod and the corporal punishment associated with early instruction in the trivium. As for physical discipline by parents, according to Nicholas Orme, “corporal punishment was in use throughout society and probably also in homes, although social commentators criticised parents for indulgence towards children rather than for harsh discipline.” See Nicholas Orme, “Childhood in Medieval England, c. 500–1500,” in Representing Childhood, accessed March 15, 2019, https://www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/medieval_child.htm.

¹⁸ Chartres's depiction of Grammar with the switch and the book appears in manuscript illustrations such as those for Herrad of Landsberg's Hortus Deliciarum (1180) and in the material arts, such as the ceiling of the west nave in Peterborough Cathedral (1220). See Herrad of Hohenburg, Hortus Deliciarum, ed. Rosalie Green, T. Julian Brown, and Kenneth Levy, 2 vols., Studies of the Warburg Institute 36 (Leiden, 1979), 2. 104; C. J. P. Cave and Tancred Borenius, “The Painted Ceiling in the Nave of Peterborough Cathedral,” Archaeologia 87 (1938): 297–309. See also Michael Camille, “Illuminating Thought: The Trivial Arts in British Library, Burney MS 275,” in New Offerings, Ancient Treasures: Studies in Medieval Art for George Henderson, ed. Paul Binski and William Noel (Stroud, 2001), 347.

¹⁹ There is considerable debate about who supervised the sculptural program at Chartres. An argument for Thierry's influence can be found, for instance, in Adolf Katzenellenbogen, The Sculptural Programs of Chartres Cathedral: Christ, Mary, Ecclesia (Baltimore, 1959), 19. However, R. W. Southern (Medieval Humanism and Other Studies [Oxford,1970], 68) doubts Thierry's influence, and others have offered other theories, though there seems to have been a return to Thierry in the late 1990s. See, for instance, Paul Williamson's statement (Gothic Sculpture 1140–1300 [New Haven, 1995], 16) that the sculpture at Chartres reflects Thierry's thinking on the liberal arts. For Thierry's characterization of Lady Grammar as a “matron,” see the Prologue to the Heptateuchon in Copeland and Sluiter, eds., Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric (n.8 above), 441.

²⁰ Margot E. Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres: Making History through Liturgy and the Arts (New Haven, 2010).

²¹ Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres, 224.

²² Laura Spitzer, “The Cult of the Virgin and Gothic Sculpture: Evaluating Opposition in the Chartres West Façade Capital Frieze,” Gesta 33 (1994), 132.

²³ Kathleen Nolan, “Ritual and Visual Experience in the Capital Frieze at Chartres,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 123–24 (1994), 56.

²⁴ See especially Rachel Fulton Brown, ed., The Brill Companion to Medieval Marian Devotion (Leiden, forthcoming).

²⁵ Émile Mâle, Religious Art in France, XIII Century: A Study in Mediaeval Iconography and Its Sources of Inspiration, trans. Dora Nussey (London, 1913), 86–87.

²⁶ Adolf Katzenellenbogen, “The Representation of the Seven Liberal Arts,” in Twelfth-Century Europe and the Foundations of Modern Society, ed. Marshall Clagett, Gaines Post, and Robert Reynolds (Madison, 1961), 39–55. For a more recent survey of representations of the seven arts, with a special focus on Grammar, see Annemarieke Willemsen, Back to the Schoolyard: The Daily Practice of Medieval and Renaissance Education (Turnhout, 2008), 213–60.

²⁷ Katzenellenbogen, Chartres Cathedral, 15.

²⁸ Katzenellenbogen, Chartres Cathedral, 17.

²⁹ Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres, 237.

³⁰ Barbara Newman, God and the Goddesses: Vision, Poetry and Belief in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia, 2003), 190–91.

³¹ Fassler, The Virgin of Chartres, 237.

³² Hunt, “The Introductions to the ‘Artes’ in the Twelfth Century,” 123. See n. 8 above.

³³ The artistic program at Chartres further aligns the Virgin with grammar school education through a thirteenth-century window depicting the life of the Virgin, one pane showing Joachim and Anna escorting her to meet the temple schoolmaster and another, the Virgin studying in the school with other girls.

³⁴ Spitzer, “The Cult of the Virgin” (n. 22 above), 137.

³⁵ Cicero's De inventione begins with a myth of origins of human civilization. Language and rhetorical studies civilize human beings, separate them from beasts, and allow for culture to flourish. See Cicero, On Invention, trans. H. M. Hubbell, in Cicero II, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA, 1949), 1. 2–4.

³⁶ In addition to pointing out the “good boy / bad boy” theme, Cestaro summarizes various interpretations of Chartres's sculpture of Grammar. See Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (n. 2 above), 42–43.

³⁷ John may have studied at Chartres's cathedral school and was bishop of Chartres from 1176 until his death. For a discussion of John of Salisbury's relationship with the School of Chartres, see Édouard Jeauneau, Rethinking the School of Chartres, trans. Claude Paul Desmarais (Toronto, 2009), 37–40, 77–90. Although many details of Alan's life are not known, his writings on the relationship between God and Nature have been connected to the philosophical teachings at Chartres. See, for instance, Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton, 1972), 187–219. Wetherbee labels Alan a “Chartrian poet” (3).

³⁸ John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 11.

³⁹ John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 9–11.

⁴⁰ Alan of Lille, The Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto, 1980), 68, 133, 156–59, 162, 164, 186. See Jan Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual (Ann Arbor, MI: 1985).

⁴¹ Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex, 14.

⁴² Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto, 1973), 84; Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, 41.

⁴³ On the necessity of breast milk to infant survival, see Mary Martin McLaughlin, “Survivors and Surrogates: Children and Parents from the Ninth to the Thirteenth Centuries,” ed. Lloyd de Mause (New York, 1974), 115. According to James Bruce Ross, Tuscan preachers such as Bernardino of Siena and handbooks on child raising warned parents not to allow a foolish nurse or animal's milk to corrupt the child, lest he or she become foolish or bestial. Ross, “The Middle Class Child in Urban Italy, Fourteenth to Early Sixteenth Century,” in The History of Childhood, ed. Lloyd de Mause (New York, 1974), 183–228.

⁴⁴ Carolyn Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), 27.

⁴⁵ Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 132–33.

⁴⁶ Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, 79–90 at 85.

⁴⁷ Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, 161.

⁴⁸ Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (n. 2 above), 5, 9–48.

⁴⁹ John of Salisbury, Metalogicon, 61.

⁵⁰ Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, 85.

⁵¹ Danièle Alexandre-Bidon, “La lettre volée: Apprendre à lire à l'enfant au moyen âge,” Annales ESC 44 (1989), 955.

⁵² Michael T. Clanchy, “Learning to Read in the Middle Ages and the Role of Mothers” (n. 1 above), 37.

⁵³ Reinburg, French Books of Hours, 84. See n. 1 above.

⁵⁴ Geoffrey Chaucer, Canterbury Tales in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987).

⁵⁵ Sheingorn, “The Wise Mother” (n. 1 above), 69–80; Mary McDevitt, “‘The Ink of Our Mortality’: The Late-Medieval Image of the Writing Christ Child,” in The Christ Child in Medieval Culture: Alpha es et O!, ed. Mary Dzon and Theresa M. Kenney (Toronto, 2012), 224–53; Willemsen, Back to the Schoolyard, 145–54.

⁵⁶ Michael Clanchy, “The ABC Primer: Was It in Latin or English?” in Vernacularity in England and Wales c.1300–1550, ed. E. Salter and H. Wicker (Turnhout, 2011), 18; Michael Clanchy, “Icon of Literacy: The Depiction at Tuse of Jesus Going to School,” in Literacy in Medieval and Early Modern Scandinavian Culture, ed. Pernille Hermann (Odense, 2005), 47–76.

⁵⁷ For a side-by-side edition of Deguilleville's and Chaucer's poems, see W. W. Skeat, ed., Chaucer: The Complete Works (London, 1960). For more analysis of An ABC as a Marian teaching tool, see the following: Mary McDevitt, “Mary, Motherhood, and Teaching in the Book to a Mother and Chaucer's ABC,” Marian Studies 53 (2002): 23–42; and Georgiana Donavin, “Alphabets and Rosary Beads in Chaucer's An ABC,” in Medieval Rhetoric: A Casebook, ed. Scott Troyan (London, 2004), 25–39.

⁵⁸ Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex, 54. Examples supplied by Ziolkowski include the words figura and schema that gesture toward both figures of speech and sexual positions.

⁵⁹ John A. Alford, “The Grammatical Metaphor: A Survey of Its Use in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 57 (1982): 728–60 at 729. See also Ernst R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton, 1952), 414–15. On grammatical puns related to the papal Curia, see Paul Lehmann, Die Parodie im Mittelalter (Munich, 1922).

⁶⁰ “You are the destroyer [ablative] of death / Because you are the bearer [genitive] [of Jesus] / Born without fault / You are a drier of tears / Restorer and giver [dative] / Of liberty to the lost,” my translation. See Walter of Wimborne, “Ave Virgo Mater Christi,” in The Poems of Walter of Wimborne, ed. A. G. Rigg (Toronto, 1978), 159, stanza 61. For further analysis, see Georgiana Donavin, Scribit Mater: Mary and the Language Arts in the Literature of Medieval England (Washington, DC, 2012), 127–33.

⁶¹ For general background on the artes poetriae, see, for instance, James J. Murphy, Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1974), 135–93; and Douglas Kelly, The Arts of Poetry and Prose (Turnhout, 1991).

⁶² Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Columbus, 2010). Chapter 2 discusses the commentaries on the Poetria Nova pertinent to elementary and intermediate schools; chapter 4 deals with the handbook's use in Central European universities.

⁶³ Matthew of Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria in Les arts poétique du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris, 1924; repr. 1962), 106–93.

⁶⁴ Matthew of Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria, 127.

⁶⁵ Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille's Grammar of Sex, 60–61.

⁶⁶ Garrett P. J. Epp, “Learning to Write with Venus's Pen: Sexual Regulation in Matthew of Vendôme's Ars versificatoria,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto, 1996), 256–79. In addition, Robert Glendinning (“Eros, Agape, and Rhetoric around 1200: Gervase of Melkley's Ars poetica and Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan,” Speculum 67 [1992]: 892–925 at 892) discusses the “symbiotic” relationship between eros and rhetoric in the medieval artes and literature.

⁶⁷ Hans-Jürgen Gräbner, Gervais von Melkley: Ars Poetica (Münster, 1965). Catherine Yodice Giles, ed. and trans., “Gervais of Melkley's Treatise on the Art of Versifying and the Method of Composing in Prose: Translation and Commentary” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1973).

⁶⁸ During email correspondence with the author in September, 2018, Alan Rosiene offered the insight that Gervais probably wrote the Marian poem in advance of the poetic treatise to advertise grammatical and pedagogical skills. The order of Gervais's texts in the Hunterian manuscript is presented in Bruce Harbert, ed., A Thirteenth-Century Anthology of Rhetorical Poems (Toronto, 1975).

⁶⁹ Gräbner, Gervais von Melkley, 1.

⁷⁰ Gräbner, Gervais von Melkley, 162.14, 230.7.

⁷¹ Gräbner, Gervais von Melkley, 177.4, 5.

⁷² Glendinning, “Eros, Agape, and Rhetoric,” 908.

⁷³ Gräbner, Gervais von Melkley, 230.10.

⁷⁴ Gräbner, Gervais von Melkley, 3.25.

⁷⁵ Giles, Gervais of Melkley's Treatise, xxvi–xxx.

⁷⁶ Gräbner, Gervais von Melkley, 230.5.

⁷⁷ Gräbner, Gervais von Melkley, 93.

⁷⁸ Eberhard the German, Laborintus, in Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe siècle, ed. Edmond Faral (Paris, 1924, repr. 1962); John of Garland, The Parisiana Poetria of John of Garland, ed. and trans. Traugott Lawler (New Haven, 1974).

⁷⁹ John of Garland, Epithalamium Beate Marie Virginis, ed. and trans. Antonio Saiani (Florence, 1995). Evelyn Faye Wilson, “A Study of the Epithalamium in the Middle Ages: An Introduction to the Epithalamium beate Marie virginis of John of Garland” (PhD diss., University of California Berkeley, 1930). Donavin, Scribit Mater (n. 60 above), 87–100.

⁸⁰ Robin R. Hass, “Archetypus, Imaginatio, and Inventio: the Poet as Artifex and the Creation of a Feminized Language, Subject, and Text,” Ennarratio 4 (1997), 27.

⁸¹ Gary P. Cestaro, “Dante, Boncampagno da Signa, Eberhard the German, and the Rhetoric of the Maternal Body,” in The Rhetoric Canon, ed. Brenda Deen Schildgen (Detroit, 1997), 181.

⁸² Faral, ed., Laborintus, 38–39. See also William M. Purcell, “Eberhard the German and the Labyrinth of Learning: Grammar, Poesy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy,” Rhetorica 11 (1993): 95–118 at 97.

⁸³ Eberhard the German, “Iambic Verses,” in Laborintus, 372, stanza 9.

⁸⁴ Eberhard the German, Laborintus, 796–99.

⁸⁵ Evelyn Carlson, “The Laborintus of Eberhard, Rendered into English with Introduction and Notes” (MA thesis, Cornell University, 1930), 52.

⁸⁶ Eberhard the German, Laborintus, 792.

⁸⁷ John of Garland, Parisiana Poetria, 183.

⁸⁸ Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body (n. 2 above), 163.

⁸⁹ Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, 166; Dante Alighieri, Paradiso, in The Divine Comedy, ed. and trans. C. S. Singleton, 3 vols (Princeton, 1990), 3.33.108.

⁹⁰ Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven, 2006), 104. Manuscripts that portray a teacher through the emblems of the switch and the book also include copies of the Romance of Alexander. See Mark Cruse, Illuminating the “Roman d’ Alexandre”: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 264; Manuscripts as Monument (Cambridge, 2011), 186–87. This list of woodcuts is pointed out in Ben Parsons, “Beaten for a Book: Domestic and Pedagogical Violence in The Wife of Bath's Prologue,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 37 (2015): 168. The images are presented in Wilhelm Ludwig Schreiber, Die deutschen “Accipies” und Magister cum Discipulis-Holzschnitte als Hilfsmittel zur Inkunabel-Bestimmung (Strasburg, 1908).

⁹¹ Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body, 20 and 185, n. 3.

⁹² Carlson, ed., “The Laborintus,” 16.

⁹³ Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford, CA, 2001), 272.

⁹⁴ Michael Clanchy analyzes two devotional books including images of the Virgin with a birch rod, a Latin psalter from South Germany that this article refers to as the Liverpool Psalter and a Flemish book of hours. See Clanchy, “Icon of Literacy” (n. 56 above), 57–60. In addition, Eva Frojmovic compares the Liverpool Psalter (Liverpool, National Museums of Merseyside, MS Mayer 12004) with the Waldkirk Psalter. See Eva Frojmovic, “Taking Little Jesus to School in Two Thirteenth-Century Latin Psalters from South Germany,” in Beyond the Yellow Badge: Anti-Judaism and Antisemitism in Medieval and Early Modern Visual Culture, ed. Mitchell Merback (Leiden, 2007), 87–117.

⁹⁵ Clanchy, “An Icon of Literacy,” 47–76 at 60.

⁹⁶ Parsons, “Beaten for a Book,” 171. See also Jody Enders, The Medieval Theatre of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY, 1999), 19.

⁹⁷ Clanchy notes that a familiar motif in depictions of Mary conducting Jesus to school is the book, satchel of books, or writing tablet in the Christ child's hands. See “Icon of Literacy,” 60–62.

⁹⁸ William Schneemelcher, ed. and Robert McLachlan Wilson, trans., New Testament Apocrypha, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1991–92).

⁹⁹ Frojmovic, “Taking Little Jesus to School,” 95.

¹⁰⁰ For a comparison between apocryphal narratives of Jesus's schooling and the Liverpool Psalter's image of Mary's taking the Christ child to school, see Frojmovic, “Taking Little Jesus to School,” 95–99.

¹⁰¹ See Hans Wenzel, “Das Jesuskind an der Hand Mariae auf dem Siegel des Burkard von Winon 1277,” in Festschrift Hans R. Hahnloser, ed. Ellen J. Beer, Paul Hofer, and Luc Mojon (Basel, 1961), 251–70 at 261; Clanchy, “Icon of Literacy,” 59. The Virgin can also be seen threatening with the teacher's and Lady Grammar's switch in an illumination in a fourteenth-century Flemish book of hours, currently London, BL Additional MS 24681, fol. 70r. In this image the Christ child carries a satchel such as many medieval children brought to school.

¹⁰² Frojmovic, “Taking Little Jesus to School,” 94.

¹⁰³ London, Lambeth Palace Library MS 209, fol. 47. This image is published in Lewis, Suzanne, Reading Images: Narrative Discourse and Reception in the Thirteenth-Century Illuminated Apocalypse (Cambridge, 1995)Google Scholar, figure 216.

¹⁰⁴ Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the relationship between Latin and the English or French vernacular in fourteenth-century English classrooms, see Cannon, Christopher, From Literacy to Literature: England 1300–1400 (Oxford, 2016), 17–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁵ Bale, Anthony, “God's Cell: Christ as Prisoner and Pilgrimage to the Prison of Christ,” Speculum 91 (2016): 1–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁶ Bale, “God's Cell,” 24. Bale offers as an example an image of the flagellation scene from Paris, BNF, Bouchot MS 19, plate 11, Xylographic Bible, France, c. 1400–1420.