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4 unusual facts about Martianus Capella


Bernard Silvestris

Among the works attributed to Bernard later in the Middle Ages were a commentary on Virgil's Aeneid (Bernard's authorship of which has been questioned by modern scholars) and a commentary on Martianus Capella's De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii.

Martianus Capella

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.

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.

Notker Labeo

He mentions eleven of these translations, but unfortunately only five are preserved: (1) Boethius, "De consolatione philosophiae"; (2) Martianus Capella, "De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii"; (3)Aristotle, "De categoriis"; (4) Aristotle, "De interpretatione"; (5) "The Psalter".



see also