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THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL
ARTS: READING MARTIANUS CAPELLA'S THE
MARRIAGE OF PHILOLOGY AND MERCURY*)
BY
HAN-LIANG CHANG
) The author wishes to thank the National Science Council of Taiwan for sup-
porting his research project on the history of semiotics and The University of
Manchester's Department of English and American Studies for an Honorary
Research Fellowship in 1997, during which time the paper was written and pre-
sented in the Postgraduate Seminar on 22 April 1997. He gratefully acknowledges
the learned comments of the journal's readers regarding the Latin quotations and
a reference to the ideas of Ilsebraut Hadot in her Arts lib?raux et phibsophie dans la
pens?e antique (Paris 1984), where she argues that the system of the seven arts has its
roots in Neoplatonism, as it appears in Augustinus de Ordine.
1) Umberto Eco, Proposahfor a H?tory of Semiotics, in: Tasso Barb? (ed.), Semwtics
Unfolding: Proceedings of the Second Congress of the International Association for Semwtics I
(Berlin 1983), 75-89.
2) Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities
(Cambridge, Mass. 1980).
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THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS 539
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540 HAN-LIANG CHANG
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THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS 541
nostalgically but futilely towards the ultimate signified that is the har-
monious order of divine creation.
It is no accident that Charles Sanders Peirce formulates his gen-
erad semiotic in terms of the trivium. First he explicitly equates semi-
otic to logic6); but in his characteristically cryptic argument for tri-
ads, semiotic contains three branches: pure grammar, logic proper,
and pure rhetoric because every sign (representamen) is connected
with three things?ground, object, and interpr?tant. Logic as semi-
otic (or the other way around, semiotic as logic) subsumes the trivi-
um, including logic itself. Or perhaps one should say: LOGIC as
theory of signs covers the trivium, including logic proper, which is
not LOGIC proper. This word-play is not so trivial as it first appears
if seen in the light of the fortune of rhetoric in 12th- and 13th-cen-
tury scholasticism, where dialectic dominates the trivium, and rhe-
toric is even reduced to a branch of logic7). At this point we could
surmise the Peircian semiotic's possible links with the trivium, the
author's indebtedness to scholasticism being already well-document-
ed8). We could further infer that the general semiotic Peirce proposes
is derived from the language-focused trivium, but it can be expand-
ed to deal with other representations, such as the mathematical qua-
drivium, as long as its members fulfill the conditions of ground, ob-
The word quadrivium (early manuscripts show quadruvium) first appears in the
Proemium of Book I of Boethius's De Institutione Arithmetica where the author
observes: 'Among all the men of ancient authority who, following the lead of
Pythagoras, have flourished in the purer reasoning of the mind, it is clearly obvious
that hardly anyone has been able to reach the highest perfection of the disciplines
of philosophy unless the nobility of such wisdom was investigated by him in a cer-
tain four-part study, the quadrivium...' (71). Credits must also be given to Boethius's
predecessors, such as Varr?, Macrobius, Augustine, and Martianus Capella.
6) Charles Sanders Peirce, The Collected Papers of Charles S. Peirce, 8 vols., vols. 1-
6, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss; vols. 7-8, ed. Arthur Burks (Cambridge,
Mass. 1980), 2.227. The citation of Peirce here follows the standardized practice by
referring to the volume number first and section number next.
7) Martin Camargo, Rhetoric, in: David Wagner (ed.), The Seven Liberal Arts in the
Middle Ages (Bloomington 1983), 107-8.
8) Charles Sanders Peirce, Nominalism versus Realism, Early Nominalism and Realism,
Ockam, in: Writings of Charles S. Parce: A Chronobgual Edition, 5 vols, to date
(Bloomington 1982-1993), vol. 2, ed. Edward C. Moore et al. (1984), 144-54, 310-
36; Alan R. Perreiah, Peirce's Semewtic and Scholastic L?^:, Transactions of the Charles
S. Peirce Society 25: 1 (1989), 41-9; James Jak?b Liszka, A General Introduction to the
Semewtic of Charles Sanders Parce (Bloomington and Indianapolis 1996). I have not
been able to locate the following article cited by Liszka, David Savan, Parce and the
Trivium, Cruzeiro Semiotico 8 (1988), 50-6.
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542 HAN-UANG CHANG
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THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS 543
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544 HAN-LIANG CHANG
13) Fanny LeMoine has identified fifteen different meters used by Martianus
Capella. See Fanny LeMoine, Martianus Capello: A Uterary Re-evaluation (M?nchener
Beitr?ge zur Medi?vistik und Renaissance-Forschung, 10) (M?nchen 1972), 7.
14) LeMoine (1972: 132; see ?. 13).
15) In style, De Nuptiis follows the tradition of Menippean satire attributed to
Varr? in mixing prose and poetry; where subject matter is concerned, it is a pro-
thalamion followed by convivial treatises on the seven arts, thus fully displaying the
generic trait of encyclopedic erudition. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four
Essays (Princeton 1957), 311. It would be an example dear to Frye, although in his
discussion of the encyclopedic genre Martianus's work is strangely absent. The
work, as Martianus tells his son in the frame, is 'a story which Satire [Satura]
invented in the long winter nights' (2); 'an old man's tale [senilem fabulam], a m?lange
sportively composed by Satire under lamplight...in nine books...[where she has]
heaped learned doctrines upon unlearned,...crammed sacred matters into secu-
lar;...commingled gods and the Muses, and...had uncouth figures prating in a rus-
tic fiction about the encyclopedic arts [disciplinas cyclicasY (997-999).
Frye observes, "The Menippean satirist, dealing with intellectual themes and atti-
tudes, shows his exuberance in intellectual ways, by piling up an enormous mass of
erudition about his theme or in overwhelming his pedantic targets with an aval-
anche of their own jargon. A species, or rather sub-species, of the form is the kind
of encyclopedic farrago represented by Athenaeus' Deipnosophists and Macrobius'
Saturnalia, where people sit at a banquet and pour out a vast mass of erudition on
every subject that might conceivably come up in a conversation. The display of eru-
dition had probably been associated with the Menippean tradition by Varr?, who
was enough of a polymath to make Quintilian, if not stare and gasp, at any rate
call him vir Romanorum eruditissimus'1 (ibid.).
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THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS 545
16) See Ancius Manlius Severinus Boethius, FundarnentaL? of Music, trans. Calvin
Bower (New Haven and London 1989), 9; Manfred F. Bukofzer, Speculative Thinking
in Medieval Musk, Speculum 12:2 (1942), 165-80; Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum
of Musical Worh: An Essay in the Phibsophy of Musk (Oxford 1992), 133-4.
17) Chadwick (1981: 85; see n. 5).
18) Roland Barthes, Image?Musk?Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York 1977).
19) Boethius, FundarnentaL? of Musk, 51.
20) Remigius Autissiodorensis, Remiga, Autissiodorensis Commentum in Martianum
Capelloni, ed. Cora E. Lutz, 2 vols. (Leiden 1962), 2: 310.
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546 HAN-LIANG CHANG
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THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS 547
aliquo, i.e., a third sign which establishes the relation of renvoi or refer-
ral between two signs, a classical definition provided by Roman Ja-
kobson and followed by Eco and others22)? There is no exaggeration
in saying that Peirce has built his whole semiotic on that single ele-
ment of copula, who has extensively discussed the sign functions of
copula, such as equality, attribution, predication and subsumption,
not only in language, but also in logic and algebra. Earlier we said
Peirce has equated semiotic to logic. What he refers to is actually
our faculty of reasoning from a single sign to other signs through the
dynamic triangular relationship among ground, object, and inter-
pr?tant23).
Regarding the text of Martianus Capella, the question can be now
boiled down to: "How does the copula function, not only within one
system, but across several systems, such as marriage, rhetoric, and
music, or even among all the seven siblings?" The word copula, with
its variants and derivatives, like cum ita expers totius copulae censeatur, ne...
copulis interesset (40), copulam nuptialem (109), copulatiuae coniunctione (286),
recurs throughout the text, and most conspicuously in the last book
of Harmony.
Harmony is the last bridesmaid to address the bride Philology and
the convivial Olympian company. She is charged with a more diffi-
cult task than the other six maids, and is faced with a dilemma
which they are not: Whether to perform music or to talk about
music? Or, how not to perform music when her art and only her art
entails performance? As Jupiter says, haec quippe et superum curas prae
22) Roman Jakobson, A Glance at the Devebpment of Semwtics, Opening report at the
First International Congress of Semiotics, Milan, June 2, 1974, in: Selected Writings,
8 vols., vol. 7, ed. Stephen Rudy (Berlin, New York, and Amsterdam 1985), 7: 199
218; Eco, Proposal for a History of Semiotics, 77. The French term 'renvof has been ren-
dered as 'referral'. Although Jakobson casually alludes to aliquid stat pro aliquo, hi
definition is rather based on linguistic opposition and equivalence. Therefore the
semiotic function of referral should be operated intra-systemically rather than inter-
systemically. A better translation, then, would be 'reciprocity' or 'double presuppo
sition'.
23) When we say De Nuptiis is a Menippean satire, we are copulating (i.e., using
a sign to link) a subject to a predicate, a substance to a quality (or ground), a text
to a genre, in short, one sign to another, and to still another, thus ad infinitum. When
we say, as Peirce already did in November 1866, "There is no griffin" and "A grif
fin is a winged quadruped", we are using a copula to inquire into the actuality and
possibility of being, into knowledge and fiction. Isn't this exactly what Martianus
does with his copula sacra deum ? See Peirce, Wntings of Charles S. Parce: A Chronobgkal
Edition, vol. I, 517.
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548 HAN-LIANG CHANG
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THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS 549
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550 HAN-LIANG CHANG
24) See, for example, Nicholas Ruwet, Langage, Munque, Po?sie (Paris 1972); Jean-
Jacques Nattiez, Fondaments d'une s?miobgk de la musique (Paris 1975); Eero Tarasti,
Myth and Musk: A Semiotic Approach to the Aesthetics of Myth in Music, Espeaally That of
Wagner, Sibelius and Stravinsky (Approaches to Semiotics, 51) (The Hague 1979);
Reinhard Schneider, Semiotik der Musik: Darstellung und Kritik (M?nchen 1980); Harold
S. Powers, Language Modeh and Musical Analysis, Ethnomusicology 24 (1980), 1-60.
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THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS 551
25) Note that the word ethos is Aristotelian, a quality or character attributed to
a tragedy or a work of art. And note further the act of attributing a quality to some-
thing or the act of predicating a subject is a logical procedure, thanks to the func-
tion of copula, which amounts to Peircian semiotic. On the sign function of music,
it seems there is much negotiation to do between Peirce and the Tel Quel members
like Barthes and Julia Kristeva.
26) Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York
1984), 25-7.
27) See also Michael Cha?an, Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Musk
from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism (London 1994).
28) Bryant G. Levman, The Genesis of Musk and Language, Ethnomusicology 36:2
(1992), 147-70.
29) Emile Benveniste, The Semwbgy of Language, trans. Genette Ashby and
Adelaide Russo, Semiotica, Special Supplement (1981), 5-23.
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552 HAN-LIANG CHANG
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THE RISE OF SEMIOTICS AND THE LIBERAL ARTS 553
trai position in the seven arts by using it to model and interpret all
of them, including itself. This is true of his account of all the math-
ematical quadrivium. What we have is a singularly encoded text:
exclusively in language except the semiotic square, which is very dif-
ferent from Boethius on music and arithmetic where lots of number
bases and patterns, shapes and solids, and even matrices are insert-
ed into his language exposition, thus resulting in a multiply encod-
ed mixed text, whose function, though, is purely referential.
But on the other hand, Martianus Capella's singularly encoded
text is not so easy as it seems as far as the functions of language are
concerned. The text is in a different sense doubly encoded: first in
the primary signifying system of language and then in the secondary
system of literature. This makes his text difficult because he is said
to have mobilized almost all known generic conventions and stylis-
tic registers?whose appreciation will take the collaboration of a
Latinist's linguistic competence and a semiotician's analytical rigor.
Let us conclude. Like all the other Latin encyclopedists, Martianus
Capella has at his disposal a huge classical repertoire and therefore
cannot claim originality in his knowledge of the seven arts. One of
his sources of music is Aristides Quintilianus, probably the same as
Boethius. But here as elsewhere, his treatment is different from
both31), mainly because of the literariness of his language expression.
With reference to Eco's proposals for a world history of semiotics,
Martianus Capella should have a place in two categories, first as a
practitioner of literary semiotics, and then as a conscious thinker of
signs. He may not have an explicit theory of language, but he is
keenly aware of language's interference with other systems. Since all
historians constantly invent ancestors, might we do so by giving two
examples to see his possible influence on later semioticians. His dis-
cussion of propositional logic can be negotiated with Peirce (who
incidentally acknowledges Martianus Capella in his 1867 Dictionary
of Logic?a very rare reference indeed32), and his formalization of
Aristotelian categories of contradictories and contrarieties is the pro-
totype of Algirdas-Julien Greimas's semiotic square?a topic yet
unstudied but worthy our further inquiry.
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