Also known as:
Alexander de Villa Dei;
French: Alexandre de Villedieu;
Latin: Alexander de Villa Dei
ALEXANDER OF VILLEDIEU. - Grammarian, b. at Villedieu-les-Poëles in Normandy ca. 1150. He studied in Paris and devoted himself to the education of the nephews of the bishop of Dol. He carried out his task by applying the mnemonic method, of which Peter Riga was an advocate and which contained each rule in a couplet of verses.
At the bishop's request, A. fixed his system in a Summa, or compendium of ars grammatica, from which the Doctrinale (ca. 1199) was later derived. He wrote various other works, among them an Alphabetum maius and an Alphabetum minus and an Ecclesiale, an ecclesiastical-liturgical calendar almost as a replacement for that pagan one of the Ovidian Fasti. But his major work, and the one that had varied fortune until humanistic spite tried to bury it, was the Doctrinale, in whose 2643 hexameters are set out in order the declensions, the variety of meanings of thematically related nouns, the degrees of comparison, syntactic constructions, quantity, accents, etc.; a grammar, in short, and at the same time a syntax, conceived with notable modernity.
On the death of Bishop John of Dol, his protector, A. was appointed canon of the cathedral of Avranches. There, on a date unknown to us, death overtook him.
Bibliography2 worksAlexandri de Villa Dei Doctrinale, ed. T. Reichling, in Mon. Germ. Paedagogica, XII, Berlin 1803, and edited by Reichling himself, Alexandri
BIBL.: Alexandri de Villa Dei Doctrinale, ed. T. Reichling, in Mon. Germ. Paedagogica, XII, Berlin 1803, and edited by Reichling himself, Alexandri de Villa Dei Doctrinalis codices manuscripti et libri typis impressi, Berlin 1804. - Cf. C. Thurot, in Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la bibliothèque impériale et autres bibliothèques, XXII, 11, Paris 1868, and in the Reichling ed.; G. Paria, in Romania, 23 (1804), p. 583 ff.
Palumbo, Pier Fausto. “Alessandro de Villa dei.” In Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. I, coll. 809–810. Città del Vaticano: Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1948. https://azioneromana.com/article/alessandro-de-villa-dei.
MLA
Palumbo, Pier Fausto. “Alessandro de Villa dei.” Enciclopedia Cattolica, vol. I, Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico, 1948, coll. 809–810. Azione Romana, https://azioneromana.com/article/alessandro-de-villa-dei.
BibTeX
@incollection{ec1_alessandro_de_villa_dei,
author = {Palumbo, Pier Fausto},
title = {Alessandro de Villa dei},
booktitle = {Enciclopedia Cattolica},
volume = {I},
pages = {809--810},
note = {Cited by column},
publisher = {Ente per l’Enciclopedia Cattolica e per il Libro Cattolico},
address = {Città del Vaticano},
year = {1948},
url = {https://azioneromana.com/article/alessandro-de-villa-dei}
}
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