Chapter I: Preface

The rhetoric and the poetic of any age, as the complementary theories of composition, are indicative of its habits in education and in literature. Thus their medieval history concerns all students of the middle age. For consecutive interpretation in this single aspect both supplements the more comprehensive surveys and adds significance to many special studies. Whether for initiation, for review, or for suggestions of further inquiry, medieval rhetoric and poetic offer a directly literary guide.

As in my preceding volume, _Ancient rhetoric and poetic_, conciseness has been sought by proportion. Space is given to those salient tendencies which mark the literary course. Minor relations and collateral studies, indicated no less carefully, are relegated to the notes, but included in the index. Detailing the actual theory and the actual practise of composition, often for the first time, I have tried no less to show their bearing, to make medieval rhetoric and poetic available by interpreting them in historical sequence. Thus are interpreted the tasks of the schools, the poetic developments of and from the hymns, the habits of prose rhythm, the encroachment of logic upon rhetoric and of rhetoric upon poetic, the progress of verse narrative.

Ancient theory being eminent in a few cardinal texts long recognized as representative, the former volume subordinates history to exposition. Medieval theory, on the other hand, being best grasped as development from an inheritance, the plan of the present volume is historical. Though each aims at sufficiency within itself, the second refers again and again to the first, and the two volumes together offer a history down to 1400. Throughout this history rhetoric and poetic are seen to be indeed complementary. Where they were distinguished, as where they were confused, they are most fruitfully studied side by side. Each illuminates the other because their relations are always significant historically.

Their medieval history must begin with those particular influences from antiquity which were transmitted through the last schools of the Roman Empire, especially through the schools of Gaul. It is a Latin history; for contact with Greek was soon lost and was not widely reëstablished till the Renaissance. But in the imperial centuries before the separation East and West, Greek and Latin, agreed so far in literary ideals and practise that the whole Mediterranean basin had a substantially common system of education through rhetoric. An inert survival of what is known historically as the second sophistic, this was sharply challenged by St. Augustine’s reversion through Cicero to the elder tradition for authority to direct the real oratory of preaching. Nevertheless the schools of Gaul continued the sophistic tradition beyond the fall of Rome.

Nor were the large philosophy of rhetoric in Cicero’s _De oratore_, the great survey of Quintilian, the later medieval guides. The prevalent textbooks were Cicero’s youthful digest _De inventione_ and a second book universally attributed to him, the _Rhetorica ad Herennium_. Though the survival of these minor works may be due partly to the accidents of manuscripts, their persistence has other causes. _De inventione_ reduces to summary what the middle age taught least, those counsels of preparation and ordering which ancient teaching had progressively adjusted to oral discourse, and for which the earlier middle age had less opportunity. The _Rhetorica ad Herennium_, comparatively summary also as to analysis and sequence, is devoted largely to style, and reduces stylistic ornament to a list so conveniently specific that medieval schools made it a ritual. Though the greater Cicero and Quintilian were known to such original minds as Gerbert in the tenth century and John of Salisbury in the twelfth, they were hardly available for the usual course of teaching. Medieval rhetoric was generally a lore of style. Here _rhetorica_ tended to coincide with that school study of Latin poetry which was a recognized function of _grammatica_. The constant quotation of Horace’s “Ars poetica” is one of the signs of the merging of poetic with rhetoric. The conventional doctrine from both was largely of descriptive dilation. Among the effects of this teaching which outlast schooling and reach beyond Latin are certain conventions of vernacular poetry. Conversely, poetic advance in the vernaculars is seen in breaking away not only from school rhetoric, but from rhetoric altogether.

The main medieval fields proper to rhetoric were sermons and letters. The former, exploring their rhetoric in the earlier centuries, continued to feel the example, perhaps more than the precept, of St. Augustine. Even the Dominicans had no need to seek a new lore of oral composition. What is distinctive in sermon composition of the twelfth century is oftener poetic than rhetoric. Letters, on the other hand, are at once a legitimate application of ancient rhetoric and a distinctively medieval development. They practically comprehend the medieval rhetoric of written prose. Though ordinary routine was largely content, as in any other time, with correctness, and therefore with recipe and formulary, serious study of both composition and style is evident in the better manuals, and conspicuous in those achievements which are part of medieval literature.

The teaching of _poetica_, from of old a part of _grammatica_, included extensive practise in Latin verse. This had early to take account of that dominance of stress which had gradually supplanted the ancient control by time. The characteristic medieval achievements in Latin lyric are the hymns. Radiating into other songs, even into humorous and satirical verse, the hymns were the common lyric fund of medieval Latin. As early as St. Ambrose they had created a new Latin poetry; and the beauty of their various art was not exhausted with Adam of St. Victor. Meantime they opened to the vernaculars those poetic possibilities of stanza which arise from the development of rime. Medieval poetic theory, on the contrary, went but a little way. Mainly pedagogical formulation, it lagged far behind the most characteristic medieval poetic advance, which was in verse narrative. Here is a sharp contrast with the Renaissance. The fifteenth century opens a long series of critical inquiries into poetic. The middle age, merging poetic with rhetoric in the schoolroom, was little concerned to make it tally with vernacular achievement. With the death in 1400 of Chaucer, whose criticism exposed this lack, the poetic of medieval narrative reaches its term.

I owe to the unstinted courtesy and scholarly interest of a trustee of Barnard College, Mr. George A. Plimpton, the privilege of studying at leisure his manuscript of one of the most important Bolognese _dictamina_, the thirteenth-century _Candelabrum_. Far better than Boncompagno or Thomas of Capua, better even than Conrad, this unprinted manual exhibits _dictamen_ in both scope and method. My other debts are too manifold to rehearse. The bibliographical notes, if they recorded the reading of years, would defeat their proper object of serving further study. Therefore they have been made, as in the former volume, at once specific and strictly selective, applied to each chapter separately, and further indicated both in the index and on a page of recurring abbreviations after the table of contents.

As I record gratefully my obligation for generous help with the proofs to my colleagues Professors Ayres, Clark, Krapp, McCrea, Moore, Perry, and Van Hook, and to my old friend, the Jesuit scholar Dr. Donnelly, I see further in such coöperation great promise for the progress of medieval studies.

C. S. B.

BARNARD COLLEGE

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

JANUARY, 1928.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. THE SOPHISTIC TREND IN ANCIENT RHETORIC 1
A. THE TWO HISTORIC CONCEPTIONS OF RHETORIC 2
B. THE SECOND SOPHISTIC 8
1. Philostratus, _Lives of the Sophists_ 8
2. The Character of Sophistic 9
a. virtuosity 9
(1) _declamatio_ 10
(2) improvisation and memory 13
(3) delivery 16
b. dilation 17
(1) ecphrasis 17
c. pattern 20
(1) the elementary exercises of Hermogenes 23
d. elaboration of style 39
(1) literary allusion and archaism 40
(2) decorative imagery 41
(3) balance 42
(4) _clausula_ 48
(5) vehemence 49

II. ST. AUGUSTINE ON PREACHING (_DE DOCTRINA CHRISTIANA_, IV) 51

III. THE LAST ROMAN SCHOOLS AND THE COMPENDS (FIFTH TO SEVENTH
CENTURIES) 74
A. THE SCHOOLS OF GAUL 75
1. Ausonius 75
2. Sidonius Apollinaris 78
3. Textbooks 87
a. _grammatica_ and _dialectica_ 87
b. _rhetorica_ 89
B. THE TRIVIUM IN COMPENDS OF THE SEVEN LIBERAL ARTS 90
1. Martianus Capella 91
2. Cassiodorus 95
3. Isidore 95

IV. POETIC, OLD AND NEW (FIFTH TO SEVENTH CENTURIES) 99
A. CLAUDIAN AND BOETHIUS 100
B. PRUDENTIUS, SEDULIUS, FORTUNATUS 103
C. THE EARLIER LATIN HYMNS 107
1. Iambic 116
2. Trochaic 119
3. Other Measures 121
4. Poetic Conceptions 123

V. THE CAROLINGIANS AND THE TENTH CENTURY 126
A. THE TRIVIUM IN THE GREATER MONASTERIES 127
B. _GRAMMATICA_ 130
1. _Poetica_ 130
2. Hymns 132
a. iambic 132
b. trochaic 134
c. other measures 136
3. Narrative Hexameters and Elegiacs 140
C. _DIALECTICA_ 141
D. _RHETORICA_ 142
E. THE POETIC OF GERMANIC EPIC 145

VI. RHETORIC AND LOGIC IN THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES 150
A. THE TRIVIUM AT CHARTRES, ELEVENTH AND TWELFTH CENTURIES 151
B. THE TRIVIUM IN HUGH OF ST. VICTOR 153
C. THE _METALOGICUS_ OF JOHN OF SALISBURY 156
D. THIRTEENTH-CENTURY SURVEYS 172
1. Alain de Lille, _Anticlaudianus_ 172
2. Vincent de Beauvais, _Speculum doctrinale_ 174
3. St. Bonaventure, _De reductione artium ad theologiam_ 176
4. Brunetto Latini, _Trésor_ 178

VII. LATIN POETIC IN THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES 183
A. _DOCTRINALE_ AND _GRÆCISMUS_ 184
B. _POETRIA_ 185
1. Matthieu de Vendôme, _Ars versificatoria_ 185
2. Geoffroi de Vinsauf, _Poetria nova_ 187
3. Évrard, _Laborintus_ 189
4. Johannes de Garlandia, _Poetria_ 191
5. Common Traits 195
C. HYMNS 197
1. Progress of Rimed Accentual Verse 197
2. Variations in Trochaic Stanza 201
3. Symbolism 203

VIII. _DICTAMEN_ 206
A. THE RHETORIC OF _DICTAMEN_ 213
B. DIGEST OF _CANDELABRUM_ I-V 216
C. _CURSUS_ 223

IX. PREACHING 228
A. VERNACULAR TO THE PEOPLE, LATIN TO THE CLERGY 232
B. COLLECTIONS 233
C. MANUALS 236
D. SYMBOLISM 239
E. COMPOSITION 245
1. Imaginative Method 245
2. Logical Method 247
F. STYLE 250
1. Rhythm 250
2. Balance and Rime 251
3. Refrain 254

X. POETIC ACHIEVEMENT IN VERNACULAR 258
A. LYRIC AND EPIC 258
B. EXPERIMENT AND CONVENTION IN ROMANCE 260
1. Romance in Latin and in Vernacular 260
2. Walter Map and Marie 261
3. Chrétien de Troyes 264
4. Conventional Composition 267
C. THE POETIC COMPOSITION OF THE _DIVINA COMMEDIA_ 269
D. THE HISTORY OF MEDIEVAL VERSE NARRATIVE IN CHAUCER 280
1. Poetic Conventions in the Earlier Poems 281
2. Poetic Innovation in the _Troilus and Criseyde_ 284
3. Criticism of the _Poetriæ_ 289
4. The Poetic of the _Canterbury Tales_ 296

SYNOPTIC INDEX 303

INDEX 307

ABBREVIATIONS RECURRING IN THE NOTES

[The abbreviations used in each chapter will be found with the list of references below the chapter heading.]

AH Dreves and Blume, _Analecta hymnica medii ævi_,
Leipzig, 1886-1911 (cited by volume and page).

ARP Baldwin (C. S.), _Ancient rhetoric and poetic_, New
York, 1924.

Clerval Clerval (l’Abbé A.), _Les écoles de Chartres au moyen
âge, du Ve au XVIe siècle_, Chartres, 1895.

CSE _Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum latinorum_, Vienna.

F Faral (E.), _Les arts poétiques du XIIe et du XIIIe
siècle_, recherches et documents sur la technique
littéraire du moyen âge, Paris, 1924.

Halm Halm (K.), _Rhetores latini minores_, Leipzig, 1863.

Keil Keil (H.), _Grammatici latini_, Leipzig, 1870-1880
(cited by volume and page).

Manacorda Manacorda (G.), _Storia della scuola in Italia_,
volume I, _Il medio evo_, Milan, 1913 (2 parts in
separate volumes).

Manitius Manitius (M.), _Geschichte der lateinischen Literatur
des Mittelalters_, Munich, 1911, 2 vols. (in Von
Mueller’s Handbuch der klassischen Alterthums-Wissenschaft,
IX, ii).

Mearns Mearns (J.), _Early Latin hymnaries_, an index of
hymns in hymnaries before 1100, Cambridge (University
Press), 1913.

MGH _Monumenta Germaniæ historica_ (cited by page of
the appropriate volume).

NE _Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque
Nationale ..._ (cited by volume, part, and page).

PL _Patrologia latina_ (Migne, cited by volume and column).