This is the first major study of the cultural work performed by grammatica, the central discipline concerned with literacy, language, interpretation, and literature in medieval society. Grammatica was concerned with all aspects of the Latin literary text, its language, meaning, and value.

Martin Irvine demonstrates that grammatica, though the first of the liberal arts, was not simply one discipline among many: it had an essentially constitutive function, defining language, meaning, and texts for the other medieval disciplines. Martin Irvine draws together several aspects of medieval culture - literary theory, the nature of literacy, education, biblical interpretation, the literary canon, and linguistic thought - in order to disclose the more far-reaching social effects of grammatica, chief of which was the making of textual culture in the medieval West.

The book is based on new and previously neglected sources, many of which have been edited and translated from medieval manuscripts for the first time.