Liber mayor Prisciani de ordinatione partium orationis

MS Codex 1243 is a thirteenth-century copy of Priscian’s treatise on grammar, the Institutiones Grammaticae, written in the early sixth century. Priscian’s original text contained eighteen sections. The first sixteen sections discuss sounds, word formation, and inflections. The seventeenth and eighteenth sections, the two contained in MS Codex 1243, cover syntax.

MS Codex 1243 was clearly designed for study and shows signs of heavy use. The main text is surrounded by larger margins for notes and commentary. The pages shown here have extensive notes in the margins and between the lines of the main text written in several hands. There is also a manicule with an elaborately decorated sleeve as well as a whimsical sketch of a stag.

During the early middle ages, the grammatical treatises of Donatus were the most popular texts used to teach the subject of grammar. However, beginning in the ninth century, Carolingian scholars began to show a renewed interest in Priscian’s more extensive and theoretically advanced text on the subject. It is within this same intellectual environment that LJS 101 was produced. Priscian’s Institutiones Grammaticae became especially popular in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when MS Codex 1243 was produced.