The techniques of grammar and rhetoric – the language arts of classical learning – had long played an integral role in Christian Bible interpretation and were a central part of the curriculum of the cathedral schools. Grammar, the first of the liberal arts, encompassed a range of reading skills and prominently included enarratio poetarum (i.e., interpreting the poets). As the important Carolingian theologian and Bible interpreter Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856) remarked, “grammar (grammatica) is the science of interpreting the poets” and it is “the origin and foundation of the liberal arts.” This echoes Quintillian’s characterization of the dual purpose of grammar: recte loquendi scientia (the science of speaking correctly) and poetarum enarratio (the art of interpreting poets), a dual characterization that would be repeated throughout the Middle Ages. (In Hebrew and Arabic learning, by contrast, the discipline of grammar – termed diqduq/dayyaqut and al-naḥw, respectively – was more sharply circumscribed and focused on phonology, morphology, and syntax, all of which might be subsumed under recte loquendi scientia.) The language arts of grammar and rhetoric flourished anew in the eleventh century in the cathedral schools of northern France, a wave of learning in which Bruno the Carthusian played a key role.