Classical Rhetoric, Medieval Poetics, and the Medieval Vernacular Prologue

Abstract

Of the scholarly work that has been done in the last twenty years on the medieval French and German prologue, most falls into one of two classes. On the one hand are those studies that investigate a prologue for what it reveals of its author or of the work that follows. What, for instance, does Chretien mean by une molt bele conjointure, and what does this imply about his Erec et Enide? What might Hartmann mean by rehtiu giiete, and how can our understanding of his meaning improve our understanding of Iwein? The second kind of study of medieval prologues pursues the opposite course, detaching the prologues from the works that follow and treating them separately, as members of an independent tradition, almost a genre. This second group, as it seeks to discover the poetics of the prologue, has not unreasonably turned to the poetic theory that might have been known to French and German authors of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. What, scholars of this second group have asked, can the classical rhetorical treatises teach us about Chretien's prologues? And what help might the medieval artes poetriae offer in studying the German prologues of the thirteenth century? The substantial body of work produced by scholars who ask these types of questions suggests that they have found the classical and medieval treatises of considerable use in sketching out the poetics of the medieval prologue. As far as I can see, however, they are mistaken. For, as I hope to show below, neither the classical rhetoricians nor the medieval poetic theorists wrote with the prologues to written narrative in mind, nor can the precepts they propose come close to accommodating the great variety of actual medieval prologues. One of the imprecisions that attend the rhetorical study of the vernacular prologues is the failure to distinguish among the kinds of authorities that are cited. The forensic rhetoric of ancient Rome is treated along with the artes poetriae and the artes dictaminis of the high Middle Ages as if they were all likely to apply with equal validity to medieval vernacular prologues. Then another kind of imprecision the vernacular prologues are ransacked for scraps of evidence that support their dependence on the prescriptive treatises, never for evidence that might place this dependence in question. In what follows I will try to differentiate more carefully. In the first section I will focus on the classical treatises, briefly in their own right, then in greater detail as they relate both to medieval theory and to medieval poetic practice. The second section will focus on the medieval treatises, considering first what they themselves say, then the extent to which the contemporaneous 1