A strange wedding allegory taught medieval Europe its seven liberal arts
Around the early 400s, a lawyer in Roman Carthage wrote a book in which the god Mercury marries Philology and receives seven bridesmaids as gifts. Each maid is a subject, from Grammar to Harmony. For some eight centuries, European schools organised learning around that cast of personified arts.
Martianus Capella came from Madaura in Roman Africa, today Souk Ahras in Algeria, the same town that produced Apuleius. He seems to have practised law at Carthage, and he wrote after Alaric sacked Rome in 410, which he mentions, and apparently before the Vandals overran North Africa in 429. His one surviving work, On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury, mixes prose with densely allusive verse in the style of Varro's satires, and was dedicated to his son.
The first two books tell the courtship: Mercury, turned down by Wisdom, Divination and the Soul, weds the maiden Philology, who is made immortal. The remaining books let each wedding gift speak. Grammar is an old woman carrying a knife to cut out children's mistakes; Rhetoric is tall, her dress embroidered with figures of speech. Dialectic, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy and Harmony follow, each summarising her discipline. Architecture and Medicine attend the feast but must stay silent, being too concerned with earthly things for celestial company.
The astronomy book contains a surprise. It keeps Earth still at the centre, but has Mercury and Venus circling the Sun, an idea Copernicus later singled out as worth not ignoring in the opening book of his great work. Schools across the early Middle Ages and the Carolingian Renaissance leaned on the text; Gregory of Tours reports it had become almost a school manual, and a 1959 study counted 241 surviving manuscripts. By about 534 copyists had already garbled it badly, and a later misreading of one editor's note long led scholars to date Martianus a century too late.
His hold faded as scholastic Aristotelianism took over, and the first printed edition did not appear until 1499 in Vicenza. C. S. Lewis judged him odder than anything else the universe has made, the bee-orchid and the giraffe included. A crater on the Moon bears his name.
Source: Martianus Capella
