Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Rita Copeland

Abstract

Reviewed by: Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages by Rita Copeland Shea McCollough Rita Copeland, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages ( Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), xv + 432 pp. More than three decades have passed since Rita Copeland first published Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages (1991), a study that has become an indispensable resource for scholars thinking about the development of vernacular texts and interpretative models from late antiquity to the Middle Ages. That first book laid the foundation for a body of scholarly work from Copeland that, while dealing with the variously related topics of classical reception, pedagogy, and representation, is nonetheless bound together by the through-line of rhetoric, her most persistent and pervasive research interest. Her newest book, Emotion and the History of Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, is a delightful expression of that rhetorical preoccupation, demonstrating a sustained interest in the intertwined relationships between rhetoric, emotion, and ethics that developed and redeveloped from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages and offering a compelling and comprehensive narrative of the transformations of rhetorical thought and practice over nearly two millennia. Like the good rhetorician that she is, Copeland offers a map of the book's overarching scope in apophatic terms, outlining the contours of the study by simultaneously delineating what it is not: it does not endeavor to offer a comprehensive history of medieval emotions—à la Barbara Rosenwein's Generations of Feeling (2015), or any number of similar studies that Copeland mentions throughout her footnotes—nor is it an attempt to uncover and represent the emotional experiences of medieval readers per se, although readerly experience becomes a secondary interest in the book, particularly in chapter 2. Rather, what Copeland does embark upon is a twofold history of both rhetoric through emotion and emotion through rhetoric in the Middle Ages, a history predicated upon [End Page 240] a belief that rhetoric "represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions" and that is ultimately "concerned more with production than with consumption of emotive content" (1). Copeland builds from these initial claims, describing the "double plot" of her book "as a reception history that commences with the Ciceronian rhetorics of antiquity, that develops on a long course, and that, at a later juncture, incorporates the Aristotelian perspective" (14). Following this robust outline, the rest of the text splits into two halves, emblematized by the figures of Cicero and Aristotle, respectively. Chapter 1 analyzes Cicero's theory of affectio as presented in De inventione, establishing emotion as a valid form of invention (the process of developing an argument), as opposed to an exclusive element of style, even though the stylistic understanding would eventually come to dominate the discourse of medieval rhetoric. Chapter 2 picks up on this thread and demonstrates how early Christian thinkers, primarily Augustine and Cassiodorus, expanded their understanding of style to accommodate an ethical dimension of rhetorical appeal invested in the cultivation of "textual affection" (59), whether for the scriptures or for Virgil. As this instilled love for texts grew commonplace, it became less imperative to explicitly outline the ethical valence of style in rhetorical texts, resulting in the paradoxical effacement of this notion from Christianized rhetorical treatises by the twelfth century. Chapter 3 narrates the rise of style to a place of preeminence in the "pragmatic rhetoric" of the eleventh through fourteenth centuries by close reading pedagogical treatises (112), love letters, Chaucer's Nun's Priest's Tale, Petrarch's Seniles, and Chaucer's (again) Clerk's Prologue. Chapter 4 (re)turns to Aristotle's Rhetoric, the second piece of the book's "double plot," in order to "chart the routes through which Aristotelian rhetoric found its place in later medieval thought" (158). Copeland sketches the transmission history of the Rhetoric, arguing that the text effectively disappeared until resuscitated by a group of Arabic scholars—Al-Farabi (ca. 870–950), Avicenna (980–1037), and Averroes (1126–98)—whose commentaries treated the emotions "as both cognitive and moral forces in persuasion" (175). Chapter 5 extends the discussion of the Rhetoric's medieval afterlife by focusing on a shift in thinking about the emotions evident in Giles of Rome...