Beginning in the 12th century, these accessus[a] were excerpted from the commentaries and published in separate collections.
[1] The standard accessus was arranged as a series of questions in the form headings followed by their answers.
[1] Four distinct schemes of organization are recognized based on the choice of headings: Conrad of Hirsau's discussion of method in his Dialogus super auctores is "the only theoretical discussion of the technique of the accessus that has come down to us from medieval times".
He indicates that the accessus was by then a well established and autonomous genre, intended for both pagan and Christian works in prose and verse, and used at the very beginning of a pupil's education.
His own selection of authors consists of Aesop (actually the versifier Phaedrus), Avianus, Boethius, Cato, Cicero, Donatus, Homer, Juvenal, Lucan, Ovid, Persius, Prosper, Prudentius, Sallust, Sedulius, Statius, Virgil and Theodulus.