Medieval Rhetoric: a Casebook (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Medieval Rhetoric: a Casebook John O. Ward Troyan, Scott D., ed., Medieval Rhetoric: a Casebook (Routledge Medieval Casebooks, 36), London, Routledge, 2004; cloth; pp. viii, 262; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 0-415-97163-2. This collection of essays had its origin in a meeting of many of the contributors in 2000, chaired by Martin Camargo and Rita Copeland, seeking to examine 'the direction that scholarship might take regarding medieval rhetoric in the new millennium' (p. vii). The present volume contains revised and expanded versions of papers delivered at that meeting, together with others presented at or revised [End Page 229] from other occasions. The overall impression a reader will obtain from digesting the volume is of a variety of unexpected paths that future scholarship in medieval rhetoric may indeed take in the future. The contributions are oriented towards poetics and vernacular literary creativity, and many will require a reader to devote much time to close reading of texts in at least two languages other than his or her own. Nevertheless, taken together with the adventurous and pioneering larger issues raised in the more general chapters, the close-up papers must surely attract considerable attention from students of medieval literature and rhetoric. A better introduction to the problems associated with where medieval rhetorical studies are going would be hard to find. Douglas Kelly opens the volume with a powerful analysis of the influence of classroom models on writing and composition in the later Middle Ages and we shall have occasion to refer to his conclusion later on. Georgiana Donavin, assuming that 'Overall, medieval pedagogy in Latin for children was saturated with the language of devotions, often specifically Marian devotions' (p. 33) and that 'The Virgin was associated ... with the entire curriculum for the Seven Liberal Arts (in the middle ages)' (p. 34), proposes that Chaucer's An A.B.C., a short lyric entreating the Virgin Mary's intercession is 'both a prayer to the Virgin Mary and a tutorial in basic English' (p. 25), 'the narrator (implying) that no text of his poem exists until the Virgin creates a rhetorical scene for it at God's court' (p. 35). Ann Astell offers in her chapter a somewhat 'unseamless' marriage of Marx, Baudrillard, Derrida, medieval accessus theory (under the heading of utilitas – 'usefulness') and Chaucer. Timothy Spence 'discusses similarities found between the compositional method used by Chaucer through the poetic persona of his Prioress to compose prayers to the Virgin Mary and the compositional techniques developed in the pastoral manuals and other so-called artes orandi of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries' (p. 63), with Richard Rolle serving as an interlocutor 'between the general compositional theory articulated by the major artes of the thirteenth century and the compositional method of Chaucer's Prioress...' (p .66). His paper takes us effectively through the compositional parameters of the time, with some useful general reflections on rhetoric and the composition arts in the later Middle Ages, together with an excursion into the role of art in providing owners with the material with which 'to develop affective prayers of devotion to (their) Lord and Virgin Mother' (p. 80). Martin Camargo provides a subtle and instructive analysis of rhetorical arguments from 'time' in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Cressida, pointing out the equivalence between irony and arguments from time, the 'amorality' of [End Page 230] time and rhetoric, the tension between the 'amorality' of immediate ends and the ultimate vision of truth. Chaucer is certainly aware of ancient Graeco-Roman preceptive rhetorical instruction in regard to 'time' but is quite untrammelled in his employment and extension of it. Peter Mack points out that 'medieval textbooks of rhetoric say very little about the arousing of emotions' (p. 117). Noting a link between the treatment of amplification in Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria Nova and the arousing of emotion, he provides a close and fertile analysis of Chaucer's handling of this topic in Troilus and Cressida, concluding that 'Chaucer used rhetorical principles to read and adapt Boccaccio' and 'the writing of a narrative poem encouraged Chaucer to a deeper meditation on the apparent contradictions and deeper connections between emotion and argument' (pp...