‘Inculcation’ in Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetics and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Abstract

GEOFFREY of Vinsauf employs inculcatio as a literary term of art both in his Poetria Nova and in his Documentum de Arte Versificandi. The word has its origin in the verb inculcare, meaning literally ‘to tread down’, and by the time of Classical Latin this verb had already developed a transferred sense, ‘to impress (an idea, etc., upon a person’s mind), din in, drive home’.1 Hence the noun inculcatio could be used, like its English derivative, to refer to ‘the action of impressing on the mind by forcible admonition, or frequent repetition’.2 This is the sense in which Geoffrey of Vinsauf employs the word. Both the Poetria Nova and the Documentum introduce their accounts of inculcatio rather awkwardly in connection with another topic, determinatio.3 In Poetria Nova, Geoffrey observes that, since individual words are no more than the raw material (‘mater hyle’, 1762) of discourse, they commonly stand to be ‘determined’—by the addition, that is, of other words which will specify their bearing in the particular context. Thus adjectives may be determined by nouns, as in Geoffrey’s illustrative line about a miser: ‘Plenus opum, vacuus virtutum, avidissimus rerum’ (‘Full of riches, empty of virtues, most desirous of possessions’, 1785). It is strings of parallel phrases such as this that prompt Poetria Nova to speak of inculcatio: