ALESSANDRO de VILLA DEI. - Grammarian, born at Villedieu-les-Poëles in Normandy around 1150. He studied in Paris and undertook the education of the nephews of the bishop of Dol. He carried out his task by applying the mnemonic method, of which Pietro Riga was an advocate and which contained each rule in a couplet.
At the bishop’s request, A. set down his system in
a Summa, or compendium of ars gramatica, from which the Doctrinale later derived (c. 1199). He wrote various other works, including an Alphabetum maius and an Alphabetum minus and an Ecclesiale, an ecclesiastical-liturgical calendar almost intended to replace the pagan calendar of the Ovidian Fasti. But his greatest work, which enjoyed varying fortunes until humanist hostility sought to overwhelm it, was the Doctrinale, in whose 2,643 hexameters are successively set forth declensions, the variety of meanings of thematically related nouns, degrees of comparison, syntactical constructions, quantity, accents, etc.; in short, grammar and at the same time syntax, understood with remarkable modernity.
After the death of the bishop Giovanni di Dol, his protector, A. was appointed canon of the cathedral of Avranches. There, at a date unknown to us, death overtook him.