Schmitt C.B. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy
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Rhetoric
and poetics
717
grammar curriculum included literary criticism, metrics and expositions of
rhetoric: more
than
thirty
Renaissance grammarians also wrote works on
rhetoric. Niccolo Perotti's
Rudimenta
grammatices
(1468) included a manual
of
epistolary style, as did
that
of
another
influential grammarian, Giulio
Sulpizio
Verulano, while the vast
Commentarii
grammatici
of
Johannes
Despauterius (1510-20) includes treatises on poetic genres, epistolary
composition and an extensive Ars
versificatoria.
Conversely, the
Novum
epistolarium
(1484) of Giammario Filelfo and Sulpizio's De
componendis
et
ornandis
epistolis
(1489) define the divisions
of
the oration, the
genera
dicendi
and the
colores
rhetorici,
1
a practice which survived at least until 1586, in the
English
Secretorie; or Plaine and Direct Method of Enditing of all
Manner
of
Epistles or Letters . . . also tropes,
figures
... by
Angel
Day.
The
new importance given to language in Renaissance humanism meant
that
rhetoric was seen as a vital accomplishment in the vita
activa.
Any work
on man in his social relationships, whether as a ruler over subordinates or at
court
inter
pares,
is liable to include a section in praise of the utility of
eloquence. This is
true
from Castiglione, II
libro
del
cortegiano
(1528) and
Matteo Palmieri,
Libro
della
vita
civile
(1529) to Stefano
Guazzo,
La
civile
conversatione
(1574);
and from Sir Thomas Elyot, The
Governour
(1531)
to
the works
of
Peacham and Puttenham in the 1580s and
1590s.
The growing
nationalism in sixteenth-century literature, the claim
that
each of the
vernaculars was just as capable of eloquence as Greek or Latin, naturally
absorbed rhetoric into what might today be classified as linguistics. The
Questione
della
lingua
2
produced works which proclaimed their native
tongue to be supremely suited to rhetoric and poetry.
So
Joachim Du
Bellay
devotes the first book
of
his
Defifence
et
illustration
de
la
languefranqoyse
(1549)
to this topic,
then
discusses a series of issues in poetics and rhetoric:
versification,
neologism, rhythm, rhyme and the figures of rhetoric.
More extended discussions are found in the rhetorics and poetics proper,
whether commentaries on classical works or new creations. Between the
early humanist notes on the Ars
poetica
by Cristoforo Landino (1482) and
Iodocus Badius Ascensius (1500) and the De
poetica
Aristotelis
cum
Horatio
collatus
(1599)
of
Antonio
Riccoboni, no less
than
twenty commentaries on
Horace appeared in Italy alone. From the mid-century these were
influenced by the growing interest in Aristotle's
Poetics,
the two texts being
fused into one essentially rhetorical construct. The resulting hybrid, which
totally evades the modern distinction between poetics as a discipline
1.
On the overlap between grammar and rhetoric see Padley
1976;
Renaissance Eloquence
1983,
pp. 303-
30 (Percival),
331-55
(Henderson). 2. R. A. Hall 1942;
Vitale
i960; R. F.Jones 1953.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
7
i8
Philosophy and humanistic disciplines
concerned with internal structure and rhetoric as an art directed towards the
audience, results, according to Weinberg 'in hopeless deformation of the
texts involved', revealing 'the philosophical naivete' of its practitioners.
3
But
what he calls 'confusion' - as
if
those writers were in possession
of
that
distinction and had ignored it
—
might better be seen as eclecticism, or
that
familiar Renaissance ability to reconcile differing traditions. At all events,
these works
of
synthesis include an enormous range of
topics:
the function
of
literature to
give
pleasure and instruction faut prodesse volunt aut
delectare poetae': Horace, Ars
poetica
333f), the role of poetry to teach, to
delight and to move (taken over from rhetoric, as in
Cicero,
Brutus
185;
De
oratore
11.27.15),
the pre-eminence
o£elocutio,
which virtually comes to be
equated with poetry, the classifying of literature into the deliberative,
judicial,
and demonstrative modes, and the system of rhetorical figures.
These
commentators grasped the rhetorical implications
of
Horace's work
and made them more explicit. From Landino on it was assumed
that
his
work
offered a systematic
treatment
of the rhetorical sequence
inventio,
dispositio
and
elocutio,
and Horace's text was divided in various ways to show
its coherence with Cicero or Quintilian. The result amply demon-
strates the extent to which rhetoric has absorbed poetics.
When Aristotle's
Poetics
was disseminated and commented on, it too was
absorbed by a rhetorical culture and reinterpreted to fit. Giorgio
Valla's
Latin translation appeared in 1498 and the Greek text in 1508, but the work
attracted little attention before Alessandro de' Pazzi's edition of the Greek
with
a Latin translation (which was to become standard) in
1536.
Even then,
the Averroes paraphrase, in Alemannus' translation, was published at
Venice
in 1481 and
1515,
while new translations of
Averroes
based on the
fourteenth-century Hebrew version appeared from Abraham de Balmes
(1523;
1560) and Jacob Mantino
(1550;
1562).
4
Averroes had reinterpreted
the
Poetics
as a treatise on epideictic rhetoric, and Francesco Robortello, in
the first of the great commentaries (1548), repeats this emphasis while
assimilating the
Poetics
to his own rhetorical system. Modern expectations
that
Renaissance commentators would faithfully reproduce Aristotle's
concern with the autotelic work
of
art are frustrated by their subordination
of
the
Poetics
to an aesthetic in which poetry and drama were thought
of
as
intended to be addressed to the audience, and designed to improve them
morally through the use of rhetorical devices and by purging them of the
3.
Weinberg 1961, 1, pp. 53-6.
4.
For details
of
the publishing history and interpretation
of
the Poetics see Weinberg
1961,1,
pp. 349-
634,
11,
pp.
635-715,
with some corrections by Tigerstedt 1968.
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
Rhetoric
and poetics
719
debilitating passions of pity and fear. The controversy about whether
Aristotle
intended to relate
catharsis
to the audience and their emotions or to
the events within the play may never be settled. But the moralising
interpretation
can be
justified
and makes sense within this
view
of
literature.
As
has been rightly said, Giorgio
Valla,
'like other Renaissance critics,... is
not aware
of
any opposition between Aristotelian autotelism and Horatian
didacticism',
for the 'all-pervading rhetorical tradition in education and
literature' assimilated both to itself.
5
However reluctant scholars may be to
accept
the fact, the major commentaries on the
Poetics
in the Italian sixteenth
century are all basically rhetorical.
6
Yet Weinberg's antithesis between
Horace and Aristotle is too extreme. Aristotle's
Poetics
complements his
Rhetoric
and takes over some categories from it, not neglecting the relation
artwork—audience, while Horace
gives
much space to the perfecting
of
the
work
of art. If it is
true
that
recent 'studies of Renaissance poetic criticism
have
tended to be too negative toward the value of the Horatian . . .
influence
and correspondingly oversanguine about the good influence of
Aristotle's
Poetics'\
7
that
is symptomatic of the continuing modern
suspicion
of rhetoric.
Many
of the commentaries concern themselves with the major issues in
Aristotle's
work, but do so within a Horatian or a rhetorical frame. Thus
Robortello
in 1548 relates Horace's demand
that
the poet please and instruct
to Aristotle's concept
of
imitation, making pleasure gained by the process of
imitation subordinate to profit gained by its content, the praise of virtue
exciting
us to emulation, the dispraise of
vice
deterring us from it. These
neo-Aristotelians are in fact applying to
mimesis
the basic principle of the
epideictic
or demonstrative genre.
8
The dichotomy
autprodesse aut delectare
could
be resolved on the side
of
instruction, the result being to align poetry
with
moral philosophy, or on
that
of pleasure; either way the stress shifts
from
the work of
literature
to the audience. Castelvetro's radical
reinterpretation
defines pleasure as
that
which the unlearned
part
of the
audience receives, the
better
educated ones deriving instruction (an
unfortunate
dichotomy). Imitation,
that
key issue in the dispute between
Platonists and Aristotelians, could be taken as
mimesis
of
life,
with the
proviso
that
the poet must be
knowledgeable
in ethics or
politics,
or it could
have
the rhetorical sense of
imitatio
of other writers. It came to mean for
5.
Tigerstedt 1968, pp. 19, 23.
6. Weinberg
1961,1,
pp. 56, 64, 65, 398, 428-9, 444, 463, 476,
511, 563,11,
pp. 642ff.,
712,
790, 801.
7.
Trinkaus 1966, pp. 80-3.
8. For other instances of
epideictic
rhetoric applied to the
Poetics
see Weinberg
1961,1,
pp. 375, 380,
385,
389, 429, 441, 447, 458, 470, 489, 536, 544, 546, 565, 582, 586,
11,
pp. 643, 653, etc.
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720
Philosophy and humanistic disciplines
some theorists 'a kind of heightened and
vivid
portrayal which appeals to
the senses
rather
than
to the intellect', an idea
that
derives from the rhetorical
concept
o£ivdpy€ia
(Aristotle, RhetoricIII.I i).
9
Rhetoric
is
clearly the source
of
the terminology in many treatises, such as Pier Vettori's account
(Commentarii in primum librum
Aristotelis
de arte poetarum, 1560) of how
tragedy works to
arouse
fear or
move
the audience to pity.
10
Many writers
include accounts of
elocutio
and the rhetorical figures, continuing this
unification of poetics and rhetoric.
Great though the number of commentaries on Horace and Aristotle is,
even
more numerous are the editions and commentaries on the classic
rhetoric texts. The humblest of these were the
progymnasmata
or prelimi-
nary exercises of Aphthonius, Theon and Hermogenes, dating from the
second to the fifth centuries. In the late 1470s Rudolph
Agricola's
Latin
translation
of
Aphthonius answered a real need for elementary composition
models
(xP
€
^
a
or tne
ethical issue; maxim; encomium;
rjdoTToua\
€K<f>paais),
and it became a popular school text for two
hundred
years, being absorbed
in
turn
by the new rhetorics
of
the Renaissance, such as Richard Rainolde's
A Booke Called the Foundacion of Rhetorike
(1563).
Slightly
higher up the scale were those eminently practical handbooks to
style
and composition, Cicero's De
inventione
and the pseudo-Ciceronian
Rhetorica
ad
Herennium,
which had been the main surviving texts after the
fall
of Rome, with
well
over 1,000 extant manuscripts making them 'the
major works
of
Latin antiquity for the Middle
Ages'.
11
In the Renaissance
they continued to flourish, the Ad
Herennium
acquiring some 140 editions
with
notes and commentaries and De
inventione
almost as many. As for
Cicero's
mature
rhetorical works, some 255 commentaries have been
identified in the period between 1477 and 1600, the
Topica
being most
popular (77 commentaries),
followed
by De
partitione oratoria
(71) and De
oratore
(56). The most surprising result of this enquiry undertaken by
John
O. Ward concerns the popularity
of
Cicero's
speeches, which produced
nearly 500 commentaries.
12
Taken in conjunction with the humanists'
interest in translating Greek orations and with the many contexts in which
orations were delivered, this helps to underline the importance of spoken
oratory in the Renaissance,
13
after its total neglect in the Middle
Ages.
9. Ibid., 1, p. 633. On ivdpyeia and its cognates see J. Martin 1974, pp.'252, 288—9.
10.
Weinberg
1961,1,
p. 464: 'ad timorem iniiciendum, et ad misericordiam
movendam
accommodates',
'ad metum iniiciendum, et ad misericordiam in animis spectatorum excitandam'.
11.
Medieval Eloquence 1978, p. 54 n. 74 (Ward).
12.
Renaissance Eloquence 1983, pp.
126-73
(Ward).
13.
Reden undBriefe 1970; Renaissance Eloquence 1983, pp. 1-19 (Kristeller);J. W.
O'Malley
1979;
Trinkaus 1966.
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Rhetoric
and poetics
721
If
Cicero
dominates both as theorist and practitioner, the other classical
authorities enjoyed their popularity too. Aristotle's
Rhetoric
has yet to
receive
the scholarly
attention
given the
Poetics,
but the fact
that
seven new
versions appeared in the sixteenth century, compared to two in the
fifteenth
14
—
the commentators including George of Trebizond, Ermolao
Barbaro, Antonio Riccoboni, Marcantonio Maioragio, Marc-Antoine
Muret, Alessandro Piccolomini and
Johannes
Sturm
—
shows
that
the sister
art was not neglected. Second only to Cicero in influence was Quintilian,
whose
Institutio
oratoria
had 18 editions by 1500, a further 130 by 1600.
15
If
other, less famous but also influential, Greek and Roman rhetorics were
added to this list
—
Hermogenes, Demetrius, Longinus, Menander, Rutilius
Lupus and so on
—
we would begin to grasp the range of the Renaissance
revival
of classical rhetoric.
The
influence
of
a text can be charted in
part
through its printing history.
But
with a subject like rhetoric the influence of classical antiquity is all-
pervasive,
since the new rhetorics produced from the 1430s on are all more
or less digests of classical rhetoric, whether
printed
in Latin or in the
vernaculars. Rhetoric had reached such a stage
of
elaboration by Hellenistic
times
that
there
was in any case little room for further development. The
course of Renaissance rhetoric is essentially one of synthesis, of varying
degrees
of
completeness, addressed to differing contexts or
goals.
Just
as the
Poetics
of Aristotle could be adapted to such new genres as romance, the
pastoral or even the madrigal,
16
so rhetoric could find some new forms to
deal with. But for the most
part
it was a question of selecting and
rearranging from a common stock, the superiority of one
author
over
another
emerging in the overall arrangement, scope, or use of telling
quotations. 'Collector, non
author,
ego sum', says Susenbrotus modestly at
the outset
of
his rhetoric book,
17
and he might have been speaking for all his
fellows.
George of Trebizond, in his epoch-making
Rhetoricorum libri
V
(1433—4;
ten editions by
1547),
denigrated all previous rhetoric but
incorporated De
inventione
'almost totally', drew heavily on Ad
Herennium
and Quintilian (despite criticising him), and above all synthesised the Latin
rhetorical tradition with Hermogenes.
18
His work was typical
of
many, as
the sixteenth century was to show in ever-larger compilations, such as
Bartolomeo Cavalcanti's
Rhetorica
(1559;
ten editions by
1585)
19
or
Antonius Lullius' De
oratione libri
vii
(1558).
The prize perhaps goes to the
14.
Monfasani 1976, p. 332; Cranz and Schmitt 1984, pp.
220-1;
Erickson 1975.
15.
Murphy 1981. 16. Weinberg 1961, 1, p. 560.
17.
Susenbrotus
1953.
This work, first published in Zurich
c. 1541,
went through twenty-three editions
by
1600.
18.
Monfasani 1976, pp. 248-89. 19. Renaissance Eloquence 1983, pp. 47-50 (La Russo).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
722
Philosophy and humanistic disciplines
Thesaurus
rhetoricae of
Giovanni
Battista Bernardi
(1599),
which indexes no
less
than
5,000
rhetorical
terms
and cites thirty-nine authorities.
The
fusion of rhetoric and poetics can be seen in the very
structure
of
these works. The De
artepoetica of
Girolamo
Vida
(1527),
a verse treatise in
the
manner
of Horace, consists of
three
books, the first devoted to the
training of the poet and the defence of poetry, the second to
inventio
and
dispositio,
the
third
to
elocutio.
In the parts, as in the whole, it is a typically
rhetorical treatise. The six dialogues
of
Antonio
Minturno's
Depoeta (15 59),
running to nearly six
hundred
pages, discuss poetry, the poetic, tragedy,
comedy,
lyric and style in a totally eclectic way, fusing Horace, Plato,
Aristotle,
Cicero and Quintilian into a fundamentally rhetorical work.
Minturno is able to assimilate so many different sources because he can
superimpose them all on to the complete system of rhetoric. The ultimate
fusion of
all
forms
of
knowledge
about
literature
was performed by
Julius
Caesar
Scaliger in his
Poetices libri
VII
(1561),
a work of 310 chapters and
nearly 1,000 pages. The seven books discuss genres, verse forms, the
genera
dicendi,
poetic forms, style (with an influential regrouping
of
the rhetorical
figures),
ancient and modern poets and much else. Scaliger differs from
other Renaissance treatise-writers in degree only; but he resembles them in
another
way,
that
is, in the mingling of critical discourses, prescriptive,
descriptive, legislative and apologetic. The legislative approach lays down
what is a poem, poetry or poet; what defines and differentiates the genres.
The
prescriptive work
gives
the would-be writer specific instructions on
how
to compose, according to rhetoric and poetics. The descriptive mode
analyses writers or works, often with a polemical
intent,
praising some and
denigrating others; while the apologetic mode defends poetry or
literature
in general against its enemies. Whereas modern criticism
tends
to separate
each kind of discourse, Renaissance works can happily blend two, or all
four, and
then
add, as Scaliger does, extensive historical and autobiograph-
ical
sections, including printing his own Latin verse. Before such eclecticism
tidy modern categories seem inappropriate.
A
special place in the history
of
Renaissance rhetoric must be given to its
use by the church. The great model for sacred rhetoric was St Augustine's
De
doctrina Christiana,
which answered the early church's
distrust
of
pagan
culture by urging the need to arm
truth
with eloquence. The Ciceronian
tradition, with its celebration
of
the orator's power over man's feelings, is to
be used to defend religion from its enemies, and also to expound Christian
belief
in sermons
that
may freely use rhetorical devices, as sanctioned by
their frequent application in the
Bible.
The great inheritor of Augustine's
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Rhetoric
and poetics
723
legacy
was Erasmus, whose
Ecclesiastes,
she
concionator
evangelicus
(1535)
has
been called 'the single most
important
treatise on the theory of sacred
oratory' since Augustine.
20
Yet Erasmus tried to change the emphasis in
preaching rhetoric, substituting the
genus
deliberativum,
which stresses
persuasion by argument, for the
genus
demonstrativum,
which uses the
techniques of praise and blame,
laus
and
vituperatio.
The history of
preaching practice and theory from the late fourteenth to the seventeenth
centuries shows the influence of classical rhetoric on many elements of
content and form, improving both the didactic and the expressive function
of
sermons and homilies. The leaders
of
the Reformation soon grasped the
importance
of
rhetoric, Luther reiterating time and again 'Dialectica docet,
rhetorica movet', insisting
that
the preacher be 'a rhetorician and a
dialectician,
that
is, he must teach and exhort', express himself clearly,
illustrate his discourse with biblical examples and be 'capable
of
admonish-
ing
the evil-hearted, the unruly and the indolent'.
21
Luther's stress on the
sermon as the main means of propagating the new doctrine meant
that
special
care had to be given to the education of preachers, and 'training in
rhetoric became for the very first time in history a basic requirement in the
training for the priesthood'.
22
The pedagogue who
translated
Reformation
ideas into textbook form was Melanchthon, in De
officiis
concionatoris
(1529),
which
determined the course
of
Lutheran preaching for several generations.
Among
the many Catholic preaching-manuals one
of
the more interesting
is
the
Rhetorica
Christiana
of
the Franciscan Diego Valades
(1579),
who drew
on his nineteen years as a missionary among Mexican
Indians
to extol the
value
of rhetoric in winning souls.
The
church also had an interest in rhetoric books proper. Melanchthon,
professor of Greek and rhetoric at Wittenberg (where he delivered 180
academic orations), produced a
De
rhetorica
in
1519,
revised it in 1521 as
Institutiones
rhetoricae,
and again in
1531,
when it appeared as
Elementorum
rhetorices
libri
duo, with a further revision in
1542.
23
The basic sources are
Cicero
and Quintilian, but rhetoric is applied to theological ends, with an
important
development of the topics. His book was widely used, imitated
and even pirated; the unauthorised version De
rhetorica
libri tres
(1521)
became the main source
of
the first rhetoric in English, Leonard
Cox's
The
20. Renaissance Eloquence 1983, p. 243 (J. W.
O'Malley).
21.
Cited by Stolt
1974»
p- 52: 'Ein Prediger muss ein Dialektiker und Rhetoriker sein, das heisst, er muss
lehren und ermahnen. Wenn er etwas lehren
will,
muss er zunächst genau bezeichnen, danach
definieren; . . . fünftens diese seine Worte mit Gleichnissen weiter ausschmücken; sechstens die
Schlechten,
Widerspenstigen und Faulen tadeln.'
22.
Renaissance Eloquence 1983, p. 224
(Dyck).
23. Melanchthon 1968, pp. 36-7, 39-42.
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724
Philosophy and humanistic disciplines
Arte
or
Crafte
of
Rhetoryke
(c.
1530).
The leading Catholic rhetoric book of
this and the following century was De
arte
rhetorica
(1562) of Cyprian
Soarez,
S.J. The title page announces its authorities, Aristotle, Cicero and
Quintilian. Like
Vida,
it adopts the following sequence of composition:
book
1
on
inventio,
book
11
on
dispositio,
book in on the
three
remaining
parts. Soarez' work is
well
organised, concise and thorough, and no doubt
deserved
to become the main rhetoric-text for the Jesuit Order in the 1599
Ratio
studiorum.
It enjoyed at least 134 printings in forty-five different
European cities over a period of
173
years, appearing both in enlarged and
abbreviated editions. One of the peculiarities of the rhetoric book in all
periods is
that
it has no inherent shape or
size:
being a handbook with a
practical end, outside itself, it can be larger or smaller as the occasion, and
publishing context, demands. The
trend
towards
inclusiveness,
especially
in
the Jesuit
colleges,
produced in the next century vast tomes of
a
thousand
pages
or more. When one considers the number of editions of each book,
and the fact
that
school texts might be reused for several generations, the
probable total of titles on rhetoric
that
appeared between the invention of
printing and 1600 might be perhaps
five
thousand, while the total number
of
users would be in the hundreds of thousands. In every sense, then, it is
right to link Renaissance humanism with 'the rhetorical tradition in western
culture',
24
and to observe
that
we are as yet far from appreciating the extent
of
rhetoric's domain.
THE
MEDIEVAL
INHERITANCE
Renaissance writers on rhetoric and poetics claimed
that
they owed their
knowledge
and inspiration not to the Middle
Ages
but to
classical
antiquity.
Although
some assertions of independence from medieval traditions need
to be viewed with caution, this claim seems largely justified. The
appreciation
of
rhetoric and poetics during the Middle
Ages
suffered from
various
vicissitudes,
beginning with the
loss
or misinterpretation
of
many of
the major texts. Aristotle's
Poetics
was translated but had little diffusion and
influence;
the paraphrase of it by Averroes, assimilating it to epideictic
rhetoric, was widely circulated and influential.
If
not assimilated to rhetoric,
the
Poetics
was taught as a logical work. Aristotle's
Rhetoric
survives, in
William
of Moerbeke's Latin translation, in more
than
a hundred
manuscripts, but the kind
of
commentary
that
it received related it, too, to
dialectics,
ethics or psychology.
25
Medieval knowledge of Ciceronian
24.
Kristeller 1979, pp. 23-4. 25.
Boggess
1970; Murphy 1966, 1969.
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Rhetoric
and poetics
725
rhetoric was based on the early De
inventione
and the spurious Ad
Herennium;
the De
oratore
was known of, and alluded to superficially, but
hardly used, while the
Orator
and
Brutus
had disappeared altogether. As for
the great compendium of Quintilian, the
Institutio
oratoria
survived in two
badly
mutilated versions lacking half the text, including many
of
the most
important
passages for a wider concept of rhetoric.
26
Even the texts
that
survived
were known through abridgements or through the schematic and
derivative
accounts in the encyclopaedias which, with all their deficiencies,
often
formed the only channel of information extant.
Not
only had the texts been lost: so had their contexts. The Middle
Ages
knew
little about the democracy of Greece and of Rome before the
emperors, with the vital role played by rhetoric in politics and law. When it
lost
these social functions in antiquity, rhetoric had been
transplanted
to
education,
literature
and philosophy. As the knowledge
of
these disciplines
survived
the Dark
Ages
only intermittently, so an awareness
of
the meaning
or purpose
of
rhetorical
devices
declined. The role
of
rhetoric in democratic
politics
or
law-cases
had little relevance for much medieval culture, and the
functional
nature
of the figures and tropes of rhetoric in appealing to the
will
and
influencing
judgement
—
the whole
psychology
of
persuasion
—
was
forgotten.
In the revival of school and university education in the eleventh to
thirteenth
centuries, rhetoric occupied its place in the
trivium
alongside
grammar and
logic,
but with a much reduced importance. Dialectic
appropriated the commonplaces, definition and proof, while moral and
political
questions were transferred to theology.
Logic
became the most
important
university subject, as seen by the Paris curriculum of
1215,
where
even
the set text for rhetoric, book iv of Boethius' De
differentiis
topicis,
subordinates rhetorical argumentation to dialectical theory. The subordi-
nation of rhetoric to dialectic was increased by the fact
that
the basic
textbook
of
Latin
rhetoric until
c.
1150,
the De
inventione,
failed to deal with
three
of the
five
divisions of rhetoric,
elocutio,
pronuntiatio
and
memoria.
27
Limited
to
inventio
and status-theory, rhetoric was seen as an inferior branch
of
logic,
concerned with particular
rather
than
general issues.
At
the same time
that
rhetoric lost standing in the universities it found a
niche at a lower intellectual
level
in the specialised
arts
of
discourse, the
arts
of
poetry, letter-writing, preaching and - to a more limited extent - speech-
writing
(the ars
arengandi).
Each ars was developed to meet the needs of a
different social group, which was unlikely to study or practise one of the
26.
Lehmann 1959; Winterbottom 1967. 27. Medieval Eloquence 1978, pp. 42-3 (Ward).
Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008
726
Philosophy and humanistic disciplines
others. The
artes
poetriae
were composed by professional teachers of ars
grammatica,
but limited themselves to the techniques of Latin verse
composition for younger schoolboys. The Ars
versijicatoria
of Matthew of
Vendome
(c. 1175) is typical in its concern with composition in the
narrowest sense, the choice and arrangement
of
words in a line,
rather
than
composition as plot or structure.
28
The development
of
formal techniques
at the expense
of
wider
creative issues is marked in the
ars
dictaminis,
whose
manuals taught highly formalised techniques of assembling letters out of
stereotyped phrases, and whose
authors
turned
their back on larger cultural
perspectives.
29
Dictamen
was used for practical correspondence in law and
diplomacy,
but retained little trace
of
rhetoric's original social role. The
arts
of
preaching, which occasionally stress the need for moving the congrega-
tion's feelings, bear more relation to classical rhetoric and its teachings on
persuasion, but still prefer to concentrate on form.
30
In all
three
artes
we note a split between theory and practice, as ever
greater concentration on practical precepts goes along with a loss of
awareness of function or purpose. Questions of content are discussed in
terms
of
form only, or fragments
of
classical
rhetoric are applied to wholly
inappropriate goals. The 'principle of disjunction' between form and
content which Erwin Panofsky diagnosed in medieval art applies to much
of
medieval rhetoric.
31
THE
RENAISSANCE
REDISCOVERY
OF RHETORIC
A
knowledge of the
state
of rhetoric during the Middle
Ages
helps us
understand
the major shift of interest
that
occurred in the Renaissance.
Rhetoric now became a key subject in humanist education, as classical ideas
on language as the mark
of
human civilisation were eagerly appropriated to
a contemporary context. The praise of language in Isocrates'
Antidosis,
Nicocles
and introduction to
Helen
as the
instrument
given man for politics
and the vita
activa,
the means
of
doing good in society, were taken over by
Cicero
in formulations
that
were to be echoed innumerable times in the
Renaissance. Every
student
in this period would have been familiar since
childhood with the praise of
ratio
and
oratio
in De
officiis
(1.16.50)
as the gifts
that
define humanity and bond society, or the related passages in De
28.
Kelly
1966, pp. 263-4. 29. Wieruszowski 1971, pp.
373-7,
424-7.
30.
McKeon
1952, pp. 290-1; Medieval Eloquence 1978, pp. 113, 116 (Jennings).
31.
Panofsky i960, pp. 83-4, 104, 107;
Vickers
1987 ('The medieval fragmentation of rhetoric').
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