Reference edition:

Prisciani Caesariensis Opuscula. Vol. II: Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo; Partitiones duodecim versuum Aeneidos principalium. Critical edition  by M. Passalacqua, Roma, Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1999, pp. 5-41.

The Institutio de nomine et pronomine et verbo is the younger sibling — in chronological order as well as in topic — of the monumental Institutiones grammaticae, which is also, and better, called the Ars. The work responds to a pedagogic need and it is arranged, together with the grammars of Phocas, Eutyches, Ps.-Remmius Palaemon, the second book of Sacerdos, and  the Regulae of Ps.-Augustine, in the group of Latin manuals called the ‘regulae type’ (a study of one or more parts of speech based on classification, with an abundance of examples and a significant lack of citations). These texts differ from the ‘Schulgrammatik type’, whose representatives include the Artes of Donatus, Victorinus, Consentius, and Priscian’s wider Institutiones, and which starts by defining each part of speech and its accidents, and then addresses the vitia elocutionis with lavish examples from the auctores. Unlike 19th-century philology, which tends to privilege in the grammarians the recovery of classical citations with an eye to the function that each type served, the research of recent decades has focused on linguistic history, with interest centred on the Irish and Anglo-Saxon worlds at the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages: this has shown the widespread transmission of this little treatise during this period. The Institutio de nomine focuses on the declensions and genitive endings of nouns, and on the clear division between tenses and persons among verbs. As such, it supplies the foundations of morphology, and it became an important completion of Donatus. He based his system on that genre and helped those whose first language was not Latin to quickly learn and understand the main text for their needs: the Bible. The Institutio de nomine is used in this way by Boniface, Tatuinus, Malsachanus, and the authors of Declinationes nominum, Ars Ambianensis, and Ars Bernensis, as well as by Paul the Deacon and Peter of Pisa. The manual enjoyed great popularity until the end of the 9th century, when it failed to satisfy Carolingian cultural interests, and its fortune diminished until a resurgence under Humanism. [M. Passalacqua, tr. C. Belanger]