In Search of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Lost “Long Documentum”

Abstract

The principal source of the fourteenth-century rhetoric textbook known as the Tria sunt is Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi, but the anonymous compiler may have used a version of Geoffrey’s work that was composed in the early thirteenth century and differs in important ways from the extant version (written in 1198/99) that was edited by Faral. Examined in the context of Geoffrey’s other rhetorical treatises, especially the contemporary Poetria nova, the traces of the revised Documentum that are preserved in the Tria sunt reveal the probable structure and contents of the longer and now presumably lost final version of Geoffrey’s rhetoric textbook in prose.