Even in the eleventh century this feeling
existed. Lanfranc wrote to Dumnoaldus to say it was unbefitting
he should study such books, but he confessed
that although he now renounced them, he had read them
a good deal in his youth. Somewhat later Herbert
"Losinga," abbot of Ramsey, had a dream which led him
to cease reading and imitating Virgil and Ovid; but elsewhere
he recommends his pupils to accept Ovid as a model
in Latin verse, while he quotes the Tristia.[2] The rules of
some orders, as those of Isidore, St. Francis, and St.
Dominic, forbade the reading of the classics, save by permission.
For their value in teaching grammar and as
models of literary style, however, certain classic authors--
especially Virgil, Ovid, Cicero, Horace, Juvenal, and Statius
--were regarded as supplementary to the grammatical
works of Donatus, Victorinus, Macroblus, and Priscian, and
were studied by the religious throughout the Middle Ages.
They were grammatical text-books, as indeed they are still;
but then they were very little else. A man would call
himself Virgil, not from inordinate vanity, but from a naive
pride in his profession of grammarian: to his way of thinking
the great poet was no more.
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