Dark and barbaric age. Such is the judgment of the first Renaissanceists about the Middle Ages that has underpinned a topic transmitted to this day. But overcoming the prejudices, ignorance and difficulties of research, an approach to medieval culture allows us to gauge the injustice of that opinion. From the point of view of semiotic ideas, there are few moments in the history of thought when so much has been reflected on signs in general and language in particular. From this immense territory, this book is limited to three disciplinary fields: logical-grammatical, doctrinal and exegetic.
It is often unknown that he was a medieval author who was the first to wonder whether a science of signs is possible, which is also the author of the first treatise on general semiotics, or that the idea that logic is a semiotics also arose at that time. Also widely unknown are medieval theories about the performativity of language and on reading and interpretation. Somewhat more well known are the logical theories about the "properties of terms" or "speculative grammar", issues on which the philosophy of 20th century language showed some interest and on which the reader will find here a broad explanation. You can also answer precisely the following question: did the medievals really define the sign as aliquid stat pro aliquo? It will find that, in short, we share with them the same difficulty of harmonizing the two souls of semiotics: that which is claimed of linguistic origin and that which aspires to a general theory of signs.