JOHN

See also:

• JOHN GARLAND (fl. 1202—1252)

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 triumphis 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 pro-. fessors 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 . Fabncius, Bibliotheca Latina mediae et infimae aetatis ., vol. iii . (1754); G . Brunet, Manuel du libraire, &c .

See also Histoire lilt. 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, Lexicographie latine du XIP et du XIIP siecles (Leipzig, 1867) ; the article by C . L . Kingsford in the Diet . Nat . Biog., giving a list also of the works on alchemy, mathematics and music, rightly or wrongly ascribed to him; E . Sandys, Hist. of Class . Schol. i . (1906) 549 .

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