Abstract

In his Plaint of Nature , the twelfth-century scholar Alan of Lille bases much of his argument against sin in general and homosexuality in particular on the claim that both amount to bad grammar. Researching that claim---its appeal to Alan and his audience, its literary use within his allegory, and its historical antecedents---is the germ of this project. Alan's understanding of grammar differs from a modern understanding of grammar, but it is consistent with the way grammar was understood in his own era: an intellectual discipline with philosophical, logical, and ethical implications. The dissertation explores the philosophical uses of grammar in the works of several figures in the generations preceding Alan's, including Garland the Computist, St. Anselm, and Peter Abelard, noting how these writers, setting a precedent for Alan, use grammar as a means of discovering scientific and theological truths. ;Many of the linguistic theories on which these eleventh- and twelfth-century thinkers rely come from Priscian, a sixth-century grammarian whose grammar book was a staple of Western European education for a thousand years. Because Priscian's linguistic theories derive not from the medieval tradition of Aristotelian logic, but rather from ancient tradition of Stoic linguistic theory, the dissertation identifies key features of Stoic linguistic theory in their original philosophical contexts. ;The dissertation also studies relationships between Stoic linguistic theory and medieval allegorical narrative, comparing the concept of language, the nature of the cosmos, and humanity's ethical responsibilities as they appear in Stoic linguistic theory and medieval allegory. With this analysis in mind, the dissertation provides a reading of Prudentius' Psychomachia , a fourth-century Christian allegory that describes a battle between the virtues and vices. The dissertation's analysis of allegory in light of Stoic linguistic theory is contrasted with other modern theories of allegorical signification and readings of Prudentius. The dissertation establishes that Stoic linguistic theory is compatible with and likely partially formative of both the allegorical medium itself and the ideas expressed within it, in particular as they appeared in the allegories of Prudentius, Boethius, and Alan of Lille