Rhetorical Invention in Some Mediaeval Tractates of Preaching

Abstract

p ROFESSOR ETIENNE GILSON has aptly said that no other epoch was so conscious of the ends it pursued and the means required to attain them as the mediaeval period. It had its poetry and its Arts of Poetry, its eloquence and its Arts of Rhetoric. If you seek the key to its art of oratory, you must search in its Artes Praedicandi.2 Now if one sets out to study the sacred rhetoric of the Middle Ages, one does well to note what the great classical rhetoricians selected to emphasize as rhetorical essentials, and to heed what 'their sense of rhetorical values dictated. We need not belittle the importance of attention to Elocutio, which for the literature of the mediaeval period happily has begun to fare well at the hands of scholars,3 but at present I intend rather to accept the logic which prompted Cicero to adopt the title De Inventione as representing the whole field of rhetoric. Invention was to him the most important element of the art.4 We respect the prominence which the principle of invention has in his De Oratore, and we observe that his Topica is a tract on inventional method. We note the care the author of the Ad Herenniumn bestows upon invention. Aristotle bases his first two books upon the processes of invention; in fact, some critics I believe that his original plan may well have excluded Book III, the book which he devotes to style. The De Inventione, Cicero's Topica, and the Rhetorica ad Herennium were well known throughout the Middle Ages. The contributions of Boethius, whose works were also very influential, notably upon St Bonaventure,-