Chaucer and the Oxford Renaissance of Anglo-Latin Rhetoric

Abstract

Writing over eighty years ago, John M. Manly posed the questions that have shaped scholarly debate over the nature and extent of Chaucer’s debt to medieval rhetoric ever since: ‘‘What . . . was medieval rhetoric? Who were its principal authorities in Chaucer’s time? And what use did Chaucer make of methods and doctrines unmistakably due to the rhetoricians?’’1 In his answer to the first question, Manly restricted medieval rhetoric to a set of formal precepts that fell into three categories: ‘‘(1) arrangement or organization; (2) amplification and abbreviation; (3) style and its ornaments.’’2 Especially among the generation immediately following the 1926 publication of Manly’s landmark essay, that definition prevailed and shaped many subsequent studies devoted to identifying the various rhetorical figures employed in Chaucer’s poetry. Those who wrote such studies also accepted Manly’s answer to his second basic question: the principal sources of rhetorical doctrine for Chaucer and his contemporaries were the Latin textbooks composed in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries by Matthew of Vendome, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and others, several of which were made available in modern printed editions by Edmond Faral only two years before Manly explored their influence on Chaucer.3 Often referred to as artes poetriae, these are treatises on general composition, a genre that Douglas Kelly has designated more precisely as ‘‘arts of poetry and prose.’’4 The most