(15th century) This single encyclopedic work,
De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii ("On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury"), sometimes called
De septem disciplinis ("On the seven disciplines") or the
Satyricon, is an elaborate didactic
allegory written in a mixture of
prose and elaborately
allusive verse, a
prosimetrum in the manner of the
Menippean satires of
Varro. The style is wordy and involved, loaded with
metaphor and bizarre expressions. The book was of great importance in defining the standard formula of academic learning from the Christianized
Roman Empire of the fifth century until the
Renaissance of the 12th century. This formula included a medieval love for allegory (in particular personifications) as a means of presenting knowledge, and a structuring of that learning around the seven liberal arts. The book, embracing in résumé form the narrowed classical culture of his time, was dedicated to his son. Its
frame story in the first two books relates the courtship and wedding of
Mercury (intelligent or profitable pursuit), who has been refused by Wisdom, Divination and the Soul, with the maiden
Philologia (learning, or more literally the love of letters and study), who is made immortal under the protection of the gods, the
Muses, the
Cardinal Virtues and the
Graces. The title refers to the allegorical union of the intellectually profitable pursuit (Mercury) of learning by way of the art of letters (Philology). Among the wedding gifts are seven maids who will be Philology's servants. They are the seven liberal arts:
Grammar (an old woman with a knife for excising children's grammatical errors),
Dialectic,
Rhetoric (a tall woman with a dress decorated with figures of speech and armed in a fashion to harm adversaries),
Geometry,
Arithmetic,
Astronomy and (musical)
Harmony. As each art is introduced, she gives an exposition of the principles of the science she represents, thereby providing a summary of the seven liberal arts. Two other arts,
Architecture and
Medicine, were present at the feast, but since they care for earthly things, they were to keep silent in the company of the celestial deities. Each book is an abstract or a compilation from earlier authors. The treatment of the subjects belongs to a tradition which goes back to Varro's
Disciplinae, even to Varro's passing allusion to architecture and medicine, which in Martianus Capella's day were mechanics' arts, material for clever slaves but not for
senators. The classical Roman curriculum, which was to pass—largely through Martianus Capella's book—into the early medieval period, was modified but scarcely revolutionized by
Christianity. The verse portions, on the whole correct and classically constructed, are in imitation of Varro. 's representation of Martianus Capella's geo-heliocentric astronomical model (1573) (15th century) The eighth book describes a modified geocentric
astronomical model, in which the Earth is at rest in the center of the universe and circled by the Moon, the Sun, three planets and the stars, while
Mercury and
Venus circle the Sun. The view that
Mercury and
Venus circle the Sun was singled out as one not to "disregard" by
Copernicus in Book I of his
De revolutionibus orbium coelestium.
Influence Martianus Capella can best be understood in connection with the reputation of his book. The work was read, taught, and commented upon throughout the early Middle Ages and shaped European education during the early medieval period and the
Carolingian Renaissance. As early as the end of the fifth century, another African,
Fulgentius, composed a work modeled on it. A note found in numerous manuscripts—written by one Securus Memor Felix, who was intending to produce an edition—indicates that by about 534 the dense and convoluted text of
De nuptiis had already become hopelessly corrupted by scribal errors (Michael Winterbottom suggests that Securus Memor's work may be the basis of the text found in "an impressive number of extant books" written in the ninth century). Another sixth-century writer,
Gregory of Tours, attests that it had become virtually a school manual. In his 1959 study, C. Leonardi catalogued 241 existing manuscripts of
De nuptiis, attesting to its popularity during the Middle Ages. In the eleventh century the German monk
Notker Labeo translated the first two books into
Old High German. Martianus continued to play a major role as transmitter of ancient learning until the rise of a new system of learning founded on
scholastic Aristotelianism. As late as the thirteenth century, Martianus was still credited as having been the
efficient cause of the study of astronomy. Modern interpreters have less interest in Martianus's ideas, "except for the light his work throws on what men in other times and places knew or thought it was important to know about the
artes liberales".
C. S. Lewis, in
The Allegory of Love, states that "the universe, which has produced the
bee-orchid and the
giraffe, has produced nothing stranger than Martianus Capella". The
editio princeps of
De nuptiis, edited by Franciscus Vitalis Bodianus, was printed in
Vicenza in 1499. The work's comparatively late date in print, as well as the modest number of later editions, is a marker of the slide in its popularity, save as an elementary educational primer in the liberal arts. For many years, the standard edition of the work was that of A. Dick (Teubner, 1925), but J. Willis produced a new edition for Teubner in 1983. Volume 2 of this work is an English translation of
De nuptiis. ==Editions and translations==