Whose Line is it Anyway? Dialogue with Donatus in Late Antique and Early Medieval Schools

The instructional works of the fourth-century grammarian Aelius Donatus set the agenda and tone for elementary Latin education for more than a millennium. The more rudimentary of Donatus’s two manuals, the Ars minor, takes the form of a dialogue in which a master apparently drills a student on the parts of speech. The text was enthusiastically used in medieval classrooms, but commentators between the sixth and ninth centuries began to interpret the roles differently, assigning questions to the student and responses to the master - and doubling down on this interpretation by explaining the importance for young students of learning to ask questions. In the absence of pedagogical manuals from the period, these commentaries reveal the surprising and dynamic ways that masters thought about instructional texts and practices in an era of rapidly changing Latinity and education.