Seminar: “‘Tis optophone which ontophanes’: The Network of the Liberal Arts and Poetic Production in the Ninth and Tenth Centuries”
Paul Vinhage (Mellon Fellow, PIMS)
After the introduction of Martianus Cappella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii to the Carolingian curriculum in the middle of the ninth century, the study of the seven liberal arts, inaugurated by Alcuin and his generation of scholars, intensified. At the same time biblical commentators and grammarians began to theorize an originary writing used by Adam (or other figures from Genesis) to encode the arts in part or whole for future posterity. Likewise, scholars like John Scottus Eriugena and Remigius of Auxerre found in the liberal arts a method and promise of universal knowledge capable of recovering the divine state of the human mind before the Fall. In the late-ninth and early-tenth century, poet-scholars educated in the system of the seven liberal arts began to experiment with modes of composition that united two or more of the arts under the banner of poetry. In these literary experiments, the audio-visual nexus that grounds the arts reveals the nature of reality that underlies sensation, speech, and thought: “’Tis optophone which ontophanes.”
Image: Bamberg, Staatsbibliothek, Msc. Can. 1, f. 12v.