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John Garland

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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1911 Encyclopedia Britannica
• John Garland
The Catholic Encyclopedia
• John Garland

JOHN GARLAND (fl. 1202-1252), Latin grammarian, known as Johannes Garlandius, or, more commonly, Johannes de Garlandia, was born in England, though most of his life was spent in France. John Bale in his Catalogus, and John Pits, following Bale, placed him among the writers of the 11th century. The main facts of his life, however, are stated in a long poem De tiumphis ecclesiae contained in Cotton MS. Claudius A x in the British Museum, and edited by Thomas Wright for the Roxburghe Club in 1856. Garland narrates the history of his time from the point of view of the victories gained by the church over heretics at home and infidels abroad. He studied at Oxford under a certain John of London, whom it is difficult to distinguish from others of the same name; but he must have been in Paris in or before 1202, for he mentions as one of his teachers Alain de Lisle, who died in that year or the next. Garland was one of the professors chosen in 1229 for the new university of Toulouse, and remained in the south during the Albigensian crusade, of which he gives a detailed account in books iv.-vi. In 1232 or 1233 the hatred of the people made further residence in Toulouse unsafe for the professors of the university, who had been installed by the Catholic party. Garland was one of the first to fly, and the rest of his life was spent in Paris, where he finished his poem in 1252. Garland's grammatical works were much used in England, and were often printed by Richard Pynson and Wynkyn de Worde. He was also a voluminous Latin poet. Works on mathematics and music have also been assigned to him, but the ascription may have arisen from confusion of his works with those of Gerlandus, a canon of Besancon in the 12th century. The treatise on alchemy, Compendium alchimiae, often printed under his name, was by a 14th-century writer named Martin Ortolan, or Lortholain.

The best known of his poems beside the " De Triumphis 1 i.e. Maurienne, now a district and diocese (St Jean de Maurienne) of Savoy.

Ecclesiae " is " Epithalamium beatae Mariae Virginis,"contained in the same MS. Among his other works are his " Dictionarius," a Latin vocabulary, printed by T. Wright in the Library of National Antiquities (vol. i., 1857); Compendium totius grammatices.. ., printed at Deventer, 1489; two metrical treatises, entitled Synonyma and Equivoca, frequently printed at the close of the 15th century.

For further bibliographical information see the British Museum catalogue; J. A. Fabricius, Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infimae aetatis.. ., vol. iii. (1754); G. Brunet, Manuel du libraire, &c. See also Histoire litt. de la France, vols. viii., xxi., xxiii. and xxx.; the prefaces to the editions by T. Wright mentioned above; P. Meyer, La Chanson de la croisade contre les Albigeois, vol. ii. pp. xxi-xxiii. (Paris, 1875); Dr A. Scheler, Lexicographic latine du XIIe et du XIII e siecles (Leipzig, 1867); the article by C. L. Kingsford in the Dict. Nat. Biog., giving a list also of the works on alchemy, mathematics and music, rightly or wrongly ascribed to him; J. E. Sandys, Hist. of Class. Schol. i. (1906) 549. (E. G.)