Essays on Medieval Rhetoric

✍ Scribed by Martin Camargo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 336
• Series: Variorum Collected Studies
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Originally published between 1981 and 2003, the thirteen essays collected here cover topics in medieval rhetoric from its origins in late antiquity through the end of the Middle Ages. Most of the essays are concerned with the teaching of prose composition, especially the art of letter writing known as the ars dictaminis, and many of them focus on specific textbooks that were used for such instruction, in particular those composed in England from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Individual essays are devoted to works by major figures such as Saint Augustine, Peter of Blois, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf; to teaching programmes at important academic centres such as Oxford and Bologna; and to such topics as the relationship between the art of letter writing and the art of poetry, the oral dimension of medieval epistolography, the manuscript traditions of influential textbooks, medieval genre terminology, and the position of medieval rhetoric within a continuous disciplinary history rooted in classical rhetoric.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Introduction
Acknowledgements
A. Theory and Practice
I Defining medieval rhetoric
II "Non solum sibi sed aliis etiam": Neoplatonism and rhetoric in Saint Augustine's De doctrina christiana
III Where's the brief? The ars dictaminis and reading/writing between the lines
IV The varieties of prose dictamen as defined by the dictatores
B. Pedagogy
V The pedagogy of the dictatores
VI "Si dictare velis": versified artes dictandi and late medieval writing pedagogy
VII Betweeen grammar and rhetoric: composition teaching at Oxford and Bologna in the late Middle Ages
VIII Beyond the Libri Catoniani: models of Latin prose style at Oxford University ca. 1400
C. Texts and Transmission
IX Tria sunt: the long and the short of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi
X A twelfth-century treatise on dictamen and metaphor
XI Toward a comprehensive art of written discourse: Geoffrey of Vinsauf and the ars dictaminis
XII The Libellus de arte dictandi rhetorice attributed to Peter of Blois
XIII The English manuscripts of Bernard of Meung's Flores dictaminum
Addenda
Index of manuscripts
General index