PRISCIAN, BOETHIUS, AND AUGUSTINE ON VOX SOLA

Abstract

This chapter re-examines a series of late antique works on grammar, logic, and rhetoric that were to become authoritative textbooks for the Middle Ages. It poses the question of what medieval readers of these textbooks would have found in them if they were inquiring into the nature, status, and implications of vox sola, the bare utterance. Taken together, Priscian, Boethius, and Augustine point toward an account of the matter of language as neither meaningful nor non-meaningful; as containing within itself, however, the possibility of a total and permanent nonsense; and as capable of producing certain psychical effects in those who encounter it.