An unfashionable rhetoric in the fifteenth century

Abstract

The Poetria nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf, a medieval verse treatise on the composition of poetry according to rhetorical principles, was very popular as a school and university text during the fifteenth century, although it was not printed until the early eighteenth century. The intensified copying of and commenting on this text during the fifteenth century, the other contents of the fifteenth‐century manuscripts in which this text is found, its presence in fifteenth‐century book collections, and references to it by fifteenth‐century teachers and writers all indicate that this early thirteenth‐century text was still considered a valuable educational tool more than two hundred and fifty years after it was written. These facts reveal a coherence in composition theory and practice throughout the high Middle Ages and early Renaissance and the continued importance of medieval rhetorical pedagogy throughout the incunabular period.