Medieval rhetoric and poetic to 1400

References and Abbreviations

A. Poetica included in Grammatica

The grammatica of this period continued the traditional inclusion of metric and of certain figures of speech; and the master’s prælectio on the Latin poets involved at Chartres, as two centuries before at Speier,[1] imitative writing of Latin verse. About 1200 appeared two hexameter summaries: the Doctrinale[2] of the Norman Alexandre de Villedieu, and the Græcismus[3] of the Flemish Évrard de Béthune. The former had so long and wide a vogue that it may be called the standard medieval mnemonic of grammatica. Reviewing successively inflections, syntax, metric,[4] accents, figures, it includes under the last the lists of Greek terms that show at once a preoccupation of the time and the shifting boundary between grammatica and rhetorica.[5]

B. Poetria

Distinctive of this period is the separate ars poetica, or poetria. Often itself in verse, this sort of manual differed from Bede’s, first in being less a reference book for the study of meters than an exercise book for the actual writing of Latin verse, and secondly in giving less space to prosody than to poetic diction. The four most conspicuous[6] may be assigned approximately to the half-century divided by 1200 (c. 1175-1225).

1. Matthieu de Vendôme, Ars Versificatoria (before 1175)

Matthew’s prose manual, though it omits prosody, is otherwise connected even more obviously than the others with the teaching of grammatica. Not only is he known to have been grammaticus at Orléans; his book is inclined throughout in the direction of such teaching,[7] and it contains specimen school exercises. The grammatical slant is most obvious in those on adjectives in -alis, -osus, -atus, -ivus, -aris.[8] The longer examples of descriptive verse may well be such successively revised themes as were seen earlier at Speier.[9] The use of Horace’s “Ars poetica” is so extensive, even for the time, as to suggest that Matthew’s book may have begun in his prælectiones on that poem. Whatever degree of probability may be attached to these suggestions, there is no doubt of Matthew’s intention and preoccupation. His book seeks to further the writing of Latin descriptive verse. The idea behind it is that poetry is mainly description, which in turn proceeds mainly by dilation. Style, which is his only concern, is conceived as decoration. Though his lists of figures for this purpose (III) generally agree with those of the Doctrinale,[10] rhetoric is evident not only in the phrase colores rhetorici,[11] but as a constant preoccupation. That poetica as style is identical with rhetorica he assumes; that it is distinct as composition can hardly have entered his head, but composition in either field is beyond his scope. His sections on beginning (I. 3-16) refer not to introducing the subject, but to phrasing the first sentences. The faults then enumerated (I. 30-37) are of style. Description is expounded (I. 38-113) as appropriateness of phrase to condition, age, place, etc., and as the seeking of “attributes” in a person’s physical and mental habit, his deeds, his speech,[12] or in the cause, quality, and time of an event. Reference to subject, thought, or composition goes no further; the rest of the book is purely verbal.

2. Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova (c. 1210)

The extraordinary vogue of Geoffrey’s two thousand hexameters in itself suggests that his too is an exercise book. To suppose that it was cherished for its literary achievement is to impute to several centuries a larger and more general appetite for bombast than other evidence warrants. As school mnemonics his verses are more tolerable. As exercises in synonyms they have excuse for their redundancy. As suggestions and examples in the pursuit of figures they have more warrant for exaggeration as a means of distinctness. Caricature, which can never have been the intention of a man devoid of humor, has before Geoffrey’s time, and since, resulted from sheer overemphasis. His own incessant word-play is so anxious as to verge sometimes on reductio ad absurdum. Or were some of these tirades made to order by his students? May they be such progressively revised composite themes as the earlier schools assigned in similar hexameter tasks?[13] At any rate, a probable explanation of the portentous style, as well as a charitable one, is that the Poetria nova was a museum for boys.

After bowing to the ancient inventio and dispositio, neither of which is in point and neither handled as a process of composing, Geoffrey devotes most of his book to the rhetorical means of dilation. This is the aim of the colores, not only of verbal expansions in general, but in particular of two sorts of deliberate interpolation: apostrophe and description.

Chaucer,[15] whose ironical homage has made Geoffrey a laughing-stock, was exploding the use of these figures in verse narrative. In oratory also of a certain sort he exhibits their deviation in the specimen preaching of the Pardoner because they are perennial in sophistic. Geoffrey’s description is precisely the ecphrasis cultivated throughout the Empire in declamatio.[16] In a word, Geoffrey’s poetic, as Alain’s, Vincent’s, Brunetto Latini’s,[17] is mainly the rhetoric of dilation. The sophistic of the ancient encomium, walking the schools once more, is now called Poetria.

3. Évrard, Laborintus (c. 1213)

The Laborintus[18] is at once briefer and more inclusive. Opening with rueful mock-heroic on the lot of a schoolmaster, it glances through the seven arts in a series of allusions, and expands upon grammatica. Thus poetry is reached by the traditional approach.[19] Most space, however (269-598), is given to exemplifying rhetorical ornament, especially figures. Though the list, as usual, is long, the manufactured or borrowed examples are short. Évrard’s plan of tucking away each within a closed hexameter-pentameter couplet is carried out with some ingenuity. Though he has to take more room for demonstratio (573-594), he generally abjures Geoffrey’s dilating upon dilation. His examples are rather mnemonics than exhibitions. The fourth section (599-686) is a list of authors for school reading.[20] The order, though not obviously progressive, suggests: (1) certain brief moralizing works for elementary study, i.e., a “Cathonet” (the so-called “Distichs of Cato”), a “Théodolet,” or “Theudlet” (the allegorical verse dialogue entitled Theodulus),[21] an “Ysopet,” or collection of fables;[22] (2) the classics and their imitators, with Vergil applied as the exemplar of all “three styles”;[23] (3) the Latin summaries of the Trojan war, Dares and the Ilias latina, (4) Sidonius and the earlier Christian poets, Alain’s Anticlaudianus, and Matthew’s Tobias; (5) a group of works on style, i.e., Geoffrey’s Poetria; the Doctrinale and Græcismus, Matthew’s Ars versificatoria, Martianus Capella, and Bernard Silvester.[24]

The section on metric (687-834) exemplifies the leonine verses repudiated by Matthew,[25] the handling of phrases and clauses—even to such ingenuities as reversible lines, several patterns of internal rime in the hexameter,[26] and typical faults. After lamenting a schoolmaster’s hardships (835-990), Évrard concludes (991-end) with classified specimens of rhythmi. There is a noticeable preponderance of trochaic measures.[27] The final group of quatrains in a measure common both in hymns and in Goliardic use is clearly a school exercise in framing a stanza to end upon a familiar quotation.

4. Johannes de Garlandia, Poetria (probably before mid-Thirteenth Century).

John’s work differs from the other three in specific application to dictamen.[28] The inclusion of poetria and dictamen in one treatise, though ill managed, is a practical adjustment to the teaching of the time. As taught, both were rhetorica, and both were confined within the single department anciently called elocutio. John begins, indeed, as Geoffrey does, with inventio; but his treatment of it[29] shows how faint in his time were even the echoes of its ancient function. Invoking for it simultaneously the “Ars poetica” and the Rhetorica ad Herennium, he first misapplies it to adaptation of style to person, occasion, etc., as in a letter—and as in the “three styles” of which Vergil is again made the exemplar! Then he perverts it to the search for appropriate proverbs, of which he provides a classified list for use in dictamen. His further applications show that inventio in his practise is purely verbal and leads, as fatally as all other approaches, to the lists of figures. “Nor should it be forgotten,” he adds (897),[30] “that any theme (materia) can be expressed in six ways according to the six cases of the noun.” As if uneasy at the ancient application of the term, he appends a final section De arte inveniendi materiam, as a separate device for “boys wishing to amplify and vary a theme.” For example, in writing about a book they might find occasion for praise or blame in the efficient cause, i.e., in the writer; in the material cause, i.e., in parchment, ink, etc. This can hardly be the mere dotage of John the Englishman. It is a sharp reminder of the educational level of these manuals; and it shows that the old inventio had departed from rhetorica.[31]

Otherwise he could hardly go on (Chapter II): “After inventio ... follows electio. Tully after inventio puts dispositio, then the art of memorizing, and finally delivery; but, for writers of poetry or dictamen, after inventio the useful art is that of choosing”! The choosing that he means is of the right style, “brief for affairs of the Curia (i.e., dictamen), diffuse for poetry” (897). Again he exemplifies by a specimen letter. Memoria is considered merely as mnemonic; and the cardinal mnemonic is a diagram of the “three styles” (900), each with its proper furniture of persons and things occupying a segment of a circle, the Rota Virgili.[32] As in the other manuals, the “art of beginning” (905), though divided into several modes, has little to do with composition. A letter (907) may begin with a proverb, an example, a comparison, with si, or cum, or dum, or an ablative absolute. The “six parts of a discourse” (911) are summarily defined as by the ancients, but thereupon exemplified in seventy-eight elegiacs. As in the other manuals also, the art of concision (913) is mentioned; but the art of dilation (914) by figures is dilated.

Such clumsy handling makes obvious the misapplications of rhetoric to poetic that are current among John’s contemporaries. Another perversion equally general is that of the narratio[33] of a speech to narrative. After exhibiting quite properly the statement of facts in a letter as an application of narratio, John deviates as follows:

Brunetto Latini shows not only the same deviation,[35] but also that “natural order and artificial order” which John (905) and the other pedagogues had perverted from Martianus Capella’s narratio to narrative, and, behind both, the general misconception of the ancient dispositio.[36] Terms traditional in ancient rhetoric for the processes of composition are deviated at once to poetic and to style because the consideration never extends beyond figures, feet, or clauses.

Thus John is able to add (928) to the “three poetic styles ... four other styles in modern use: (1) the Gregorian, (2) the Tullian, (3) the Hilarian, (4) the Isidorian. By the first he means the Roman style in dictamen.”[37] The second he distinguishes not by rhythm, but by colores, and as “used both by poets when they write prose and by teachers in school exercises.” The third, defined metrically, is exemplified both by an ancient hymn[38] and (929) by a letter. The fourth, that of Augustine’s Soliloquies, marks the balance of clauses not by equality of length, but by chiming cadences. To the usual list of figures are added the ten commonplaces (939) for the description of a person;[39] to a lust-and-blood plot (tragedia), further specimens of dictamen. Rhetoric and poetic are merged in one scheme of style. The scheme is confused; but the intention is single.

The final section, ars ritmica, is significant, as Évrard’s is, by its very presence in a schoolbook. It shows (56)[40] the same school assignment of a stanza framed to end on a familiar quotation. Its classification of examples, though not illuminating, is much clearer than the subdivisions of the chapters preceding. Rhythmus, the verse of the hymns, distinguished from metrum though discussed in some of the ancient metrical terms, is presented for study and practise. For the schoolboys who used it, as for the modern explorer, this section must have offered the relief of an active poetic after the drill of deviated rhetoric.[41]

5. Common Traits

The pedantic subdivision of these manuals shows that their aim was not to organize the study of poetic, but to cover its elements by as many exercises as possible. Imitative writing of Latin verse, long part of the study of grammatica, has been combined with the theory of rhetorica through exercises in figures, and with its practise through exercises in dictamen. Doubtless the resulting aggregation was called poetria both because the exercises were still connected with the traditional prælectio and were oftenest in verse, and because, whether in verse or in dictamen, they were focused on that heightening by ornament and by dilation which was conventionally regarded as poetic. Poetria, then, meant generally the study of style, and specifically the study of stylistic decoration. The lore for this was rhetoric,[42] partly indeed by misapplication, partly from the vagueness of the boundary in Latin tradition. The “colors of rhetoric,” not always clearly distinguished, sometimes strangely spelled, were faithfully recited as a sort of Greek ritual of poetic. The confusion went to its bitter end in that stock perversion by which Vergil’s poetic was broken on the wheel into three pieces of rhetoric.

The vital difference between rhetoric and poetic in composition, probably beyond the ken of these writers, was certainly beyond the intention of these manuals. Composition for them goes no further than the adjustment of a sentence. The ancient inventio and dispositio, sometimes dragged in by misapplication, are generally ignored. The distinction of “natural” from “artificial” order provides a pattern, not to promote composition, but to obviate its necessity. So the “methods of beginning” are presented as verbal devices. The scope of these manuals suggests that rhetoric, whether in its own name or as poetria, did not teach composition. What had once been part of rhetoric was now left to logic and the debates of the schools. As for poetic composition, the active progress of vernacular verse narrative would hardly be represented in a schoolbook. What is represented, what appears alike in school Latin and in professional vernacular,[43] is surviving conventional pattern, the passive voice of poetic, not its active. Marie had found another poetic. Chrétien, though he had accepted some of the same conventions of style, had learned otherwise what he knew of narrative movement. Even Latin narrative had been otherwise studied by Walter Map. To poetic in this larger composing activity the poetria of the schools offers no clue. At the turn of the next century Dante, who knew all its poetic conventions, ignored them in a supreme composition; and within that century Chaucer, who knew them too, laughed them away.

C. Hymns

1. Progress of Rimed Stress Verse

The ancient quantitative metric learned in school was often practised in such occasional verse as Baudry de Bourgeuil’s.[44] Both his elegiacs and his partially rimed verses are literary exercises. More significant is the tentative use of rime in the same eleventh century by Fulbert.

Heribert, Bishop of Eichstätt in 1021, rimed more confidently, but still without insistence.

The danger of insistence in rimed stress verse was already evident in many accentual hexameters riming the end of the verse with the middle. How easily the combination lapses into doggerel appears in a common seven-stress verse with marked cæsura (4 + 3).

Such mechanical versifying merely makes obvious that stress rhythm was the established habit.[46] By the twelfth century anything else was merely literary exercise, quite out of the literary current; and the danger of obtruding the stress pattern of failing to fuse it with the other means of suggestion, was more and more expertly avoided.

How far even a very marked pattern of stress and rime could be carried was demonstrated in the famous De contemptu mundi of Bernard of Cluny.[47] Though its arraignment of his age soon faded, its detail of doom and redemption, its realization of eternal life, showed poetic vitality. Bernard’s failure in organizing the movement of the whole is thus forgotten in the striking success of these parts.[48]

The heavenly Jerusalem has never been contrasted with the cities of the perverted present more eloquently. For Bernard’s achievement of style is rather in the ample realizations of eloquence than in poetic compression. The poetic distinction is in the verse. The sheer technical mastery of insistently rimed stress rhythm shows the possibilities of the verse habit of his time.

Thus the poem begins; and the cento made from it is often entitled[49] Hora novissima. Accentual hexameters rimed within—the Leonine system carried a step further—are rimed together as couplets. They are entirely dactylic except in the last foot; the typical ancient variation by spondee within the line is never used. Finally they are divided into three staves of two beats each, thus foregoing another ancient variation, the shift of cæsura. The first two staves of each line rime together; the last rimes with the last stave of the next line. The pattern could hardly be more marked. Yet the drumming dactyls, the insistent rime, are kept in movement; they do not stall even when the weaving of the line becomes sheer virtuosity.

Bernard demonstrated that even insistently rimed stress rhythm could be kept from jar and jingle by attending constantly to movement. For this he exhibited further the capacity of accentual dactyls. More generally he displayed with great technical skill the range and flexibility of rhythm always chiming with word-accent, that is always answering the habit of speech.

The currency of rimed stress verse is obvious in student songs and other jocular and satirical poems known generically as Goliardic.[50] A little satire on masters and bachelors of arts, assigned to the eleventh century, is typical of the ease with which such verse could be turned.

Of the numerous twelfth- and thirteenth-century poems of this sort, many of which have been repeated ever since, none is more famous than the drinking song once attributed to Walter Map.

2. Variations in Trochaic Stanza

Rime no longer incidental, but integral and composing, opened to medieval poetic wide artistic possibilities of stanza. The austere requiem sequence of Thomas of Celano, Dies iræ, is cast in three-line trochaic stanzas of a single rime.

That forty of the forty-five hymns assigned by Misset-Aubry to Adam of St. Victor are trochaic shows the strong preference of the time. The commonest of these trochaic stanzas, the favorite hymn measure of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, expands Corde natus into a six-line stanza by doubling the first stave in a riming couplet twice and using the second stave between the two couplets and at the riming end.

Using this scheme oftener than any other, Adam rarely holds to it throughout a hymn. His way is rather to vary it in one or two stanzas; and in some of his hymns he even interpolates a stanza of a different measure. For example, the ninth stanza of this Christmas hymn departs entirely from the pattern except in the middle and end lines.

This is the only variation; all the other stanzas are regular. The Lauda Sion sequence of St. Thomas Aquinas varies the measure but slightly; and the Stabat Mater keeps it strictly—even reinforces it with additional rimes.

Adam’s harmonizing of rimed rhythmic, conspicuous above, has great range and variety. The range appears in the following contrast:

Within a hymn the variations are delicate adjustments. The hymn on the Cross strikes the familiar measure, swerves from it, returns to it, varies it.

3. Symbolism

Quite as widely Adam realized the poetic possibilities of symbolism. Imagination in the middle age was stirred habitually by types. As these spoke in sculpture and glass they spoke in the hymns. Medieval symbolism sought to induce mood, to stir emotion, not by individualizing concrete details, but by familiar typical associations: lamb, vine, star of the sea. Such symbols, long ago drawn from Messianic prophecy,[51] had become both numerous and familiar. They differ essentially from the figures of the poetriæ in being not decoration, not epithets or periphrases used instead of proper names, but immediate lyrical approaches. Light is used, not instead of the sacred name, or of some such title as Redeemer or Savior, but to focus attention on the Light of the World. So Cornerstone,[52] or Lamb, or Bread, suggests redemption immediately in one aspect. So the Redeemer is seen to be foreshadowed in Isaac,[53] Joseph, or David; for medieval art sees history as the progress of the redemption of mankind.

In this aspect the symbols of the Virgin Mother are lyric not merely in warmth of emotion, but in visions of human progress as divine. In turn Bush burning but unburnt, Flower, Fleece bedewed, Star immemorially guiding sailors, she embodies personally hope after hope. This habitual symbolism of stone and glass and hymn is less sentimental than intellectual. While it appeals to childhood memories, it opens vistas. The surcharging of the Corpus Christi hymns does not cloud their scholastic precision.

Keeping much of the tradition of its earliest centuries, hymnody has nevertheless widened its range; keeping communal devotion, it has risen in contemplation. This is the character of the poetry written for the new feast by the Angelic Doctor.[54] The enthusiasm of the popular processions is answered, but it is also brought to its goal. The greatest medieval hymns obliterate the crude distinction between “reason” and “feeling,” between “thought” and “emotion.” They remind us of that ancient saying about the sublime, that it springs from intellectual vigor of conception.[55] That is why, of all medieval poetry, they are the best approach to the Divina Commedia.