La ‘biblioteca’ dei grammatici tra VII e VIII secolo

The paper focuses on the use of literary texts as sources of linguistic examples in 7th-8th-century Latin grammatical treatises. The complete quantitative analysis of the literary citations in such works demonstrates that Christian and biblical texts were increasingly read in the schools over these two centuries, whereas classical literature progressively lost its preminence. Classical works ended by being cited almost only through intermediate grammatical sources rather than direct reading. The last section of the article deals with the specific case of the anonymous treatise De dubiis nominibus: it is one of the earliest witnesses of the rise of Christian authors and the Bible in the teaching of Latin grammar, but at the same time thanks to the use of an intermediate grammatical source de dubio sermone it collects still a considerable amount of citations of ancient texts, including archaic and very rare ones.