ALEXANDER of Villedieu. — Grammarian, born in Villedieu-les-Poêles in Normandy ca. 1150. He studied in Paris and undertook the education of his bishop’s nephews in Dol. He carried out his task by applying the mnemonic method, of which PETER RIGA was a proponent and which contained each rule in a couplet.
At the bishop’s request, A. set down his system in a *Stroma*, or compendium of *Ars grammatica*, from which the *Doctrinae* (ca. 1199) later derived. He wrote various other works, including an *Alphabetum maius* and an *Alphabetum minus*, and a *Reclusae*, an ecclesiastical-liturgical calendar almost as a substitute for the pagan *Fasti* of Ovid. But his major work, which enjoyed varying fortunes until it was nearly submerged by the irrepressible *Doctrinae*, was the *Doctrinae*, in whose 2,645 hexameters the declensions, the varied meanings of thematically related nouns, degrees of comparison, syntactic constructions, quantity, accents, etc., are expounded in sequence; in short, a grammar and syntax conceived with notable modernity.
After the death of Bishop John of Dol, his patron, he was appointed canon of the cathedral of Avranches. There, at a date unknown to us, death overtook him.