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.