From Liber versuum to Poetria nova: The Evolution of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Masterpiece

Abstract

Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s early thirteenth-century Poetria nova was the preeminent textbook on rhetorical composition in prose and verse for nearly three centuries. Before he created his masterpiece Geoffrey had taught for some twenty-five years and written two textbooks in prose. The popularity of the poem that Geoffrey wrote in response to King Richard Lionheart’s sudden death in 1199 seems to have instilled a new sense of his poetic powers that sparked a creative re-engagement with his pedagogy and its sources. The immediate result was an anthology of rhetorical poems, as suggested by references to it as a “book of verses” in the anonymous Tria sunt; but within a few years this had evolved into a concise and memorable textbook in hexameter verse that came to be regarded as the legitimate heir to Horace’s Ars poetica.