Medieval Semiotics and Philosophy of Language

The Middle Ages represent a rich period of explicit theories about signs and language, worked out not only in the field of the trivium (above all grammar and logic), but also in that of theology and natural philosophy. There are many theoretical starting points: for the definition of sign and its classification, the main authority is undoubtedly Augustine of Hippo’s De doctrina christiana (and to a lesser extent his De Dialectica and De magistro); for the theories of language, on the one hand, we can point to Aristotle’s De interpretatione in the translation and interpretation, strongly influenced by Porphyry and imbued with Neoplatonism, proposed by Manlius Severinus Boethius (sixth century), and on the other hand to the Latin grammatical treatises by Donatus and Priscian. The reflections on signs and language are strictly intertwined, starting from these texts, producing a mass of diverse and original theories. In what follows, given the limits of space, we will be able to give neither a full account of all the medieval contributions, nor of the numerous studies that have made them known to scholars, limiting ourselves to touch upon the main authors and currents between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries, starting from a theologian who, in the ninth century, was decisive for the imposition of the Augustinian model in semiotics.