MARY CARRUTHERS (ed.), Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages.

Abstract

THIS collection of essays stems from two interdisciplinary workshops held in 2004 and 2006, devoted to ‘rhetoric and the nonverbal arts’. The discussions concern both the debts of rhetoric to other arts, notably architecture, and also, more particularly, the bearings of rhetoric itself upon such arts as architecture, secular song, liturgy, and the illustration of manuscripts. Rhetoric is understood mostly in a broad sense, as a ‘performative’ art (not in J. L. Austen’s sense) concerned to please and persuade, and to engage both performers and audiences in active collaboration. A key term here is ductus, defined by the editor of the volume, Mary Carruthers, in her essay thus: ‘Ductus is the way by which a work leads someone through itself: that quality in a work’s formal patterns which engages an audience and then sets a viewer or auditor or performer in motion within its structures, an experience more like travelling through stages along a route than like perceiving a whole object’ (190). The term in question was not, so far as I know, very prominent in rhetorical teaching (Carruthers cites Consultus Fortunatianus and Martianus Capella); but it is adopted here to suggest how all the medieval arts set out to lead (ducere) hearers, viewers, worshipers, and performers as they made their way through manuscripts, songs, cathedrals, and the like.