John Scottus Eriugena and the Entangled Materiality of Vox

This article seeks to explicate John Scottus Eriugena’s arguments about the ontological status of vox in his commentary on Priscian, the In Priscianum. Eriugena draws from Stoic, Peripatetic, and early medieval philosophical definitions to arrive at an original analysis of vox as an intelligible, rather than physical, unit of speech, which is ultimately grounded in his concept of the letter (littera). For Eriugena, physical matter cannot be known by the mind because it is infinitely divisible, and so the physical nature of vox, i.e. air, cannot be known and therefore cannot signify. Only the letter guarantees a minimal, intelligizable unit that can structure speech. Thus, paradoxically, the written letter, usually thought of as a symbol of speech, comes to define significative speech as such. In the latter part of this article, I examine a grammatical commentary in Valenciennes, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 413 (394), which contains arguments similar to those forwarded by Eriugena, and several direct quotations from the In Priscianum. The entanglements of philosophical and grammatical concepts and the re-entanglement of these concepts in Eriugena and the Valenciennes commentary show how the reception and transmission of learning in the early Middle Ages followed anfractuous routes.