The Disputatio Puerorum ─ A Ninth-Century Monastic Instructional Text

A school dialogue most likely composed in southeastern Germany in the early ninth century, the Disputatio puerorum offers a vivid and direct glimpse into the sort of instruction received by monastic novices and oblates in abbey schools of the Carolingian and Holy Roman Empires. Its question-and-answer format between students and master deploys an elementary Latin that would have consolidated linguistic skills at the same time as offering instruction on the nature of body and soul, the books of the Old and New Testaments, the Mass, and the Lord's Prayer. The text's intrinsic interest for historians of early medieval education is matched by its usefulness to modern students as a short course in what constituted basic cultural literacy in the monastic schoolrooms of the ninth through eleventh centuries, as drawn above all from the works of Isidore of Seville, but also from Augustine, Gregory the Great, Bede, and Alcuin.

Andrew Rabin is Professor of English at the University of Louisville and Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He is the author of The Political Writings of Archbishop Wulfstan of York (Manchester, 2015) as well as numerous articles in such journals as Modern Philology, Studies in Philology, Mediaeval Studies, JEGP, Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, and Speculum.

Liam Felsen is a senior associate at the Louisville office of Frost Brown Todd LLC. He graduated from the University of Louisville, Brandeis School of Law, served as Executive Editor of the University of Louisville Law Review, and was inducted into the Brandeis Honor Society. Before (and while) attending law school, Liam was Associate Professor of English at Indiana University Southeast.