Grammar as a rational art and as an Aristotelian science

In this essay, I have traced the evolution of ancient grammar from an empeiria to a rationalistic art and, during the Middle Ages, further to an Aristotelian science. Throughout this period, grammar continued to borrow tools of analysis from dialectic and Aristotelian physics and became a major subject in the Arts Faculties. All the same, it remained an art which was studied as a means to an end rather than for its own sake. Medieval thought was fundamentally hierarchical, and grammar did not figure among the highest disciplines, which can be studied for their own sake.