The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland, by Brian James Stone

Abstract

The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland is a welcome addition to the history of Western rhetoric. It covers a period of Irish history—431–800 CE—that is often murky in both the public and the scholarly imaginations. There is a tendency to assume that the early Irish were sequestered on an island at the edge of the known world, enveloped in a “Celtic mist” that minimized Ireland’s contact with others (9). Being isolated in this way, according to this distorted history, the Irish were able to develop traditions free from outside influence. Another tendency, equally misleading but also built on the logic of isolation, is to lionize medieval Irish monks and scribes as unwitting but glorious stewards of the classics without whom much classical learning would be lost. In this account, as many European libraries declined during the Middle Ages, Irish libraries became sanctuaries in which classical learning was protected. This story was promoted by such popular books as Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization (1995), a New York Times bestseller for almost two years. Despite such popularity, however, Cahill and his vision of Irish history have been roundly critiqued by experts. Both assumptions, Stone argues, obscure our understanding of the early Irish rhetorical and grammatical arts, which were far more developed and far more thoroughly interconnected with Continental learning than scholars and laymen have heretofore acknowledged. As this book sets out to explore, early Irish learning was highly syncretic, folding late antique rhetorical learning into native traditions. The result is a tradition that is both “unique from and indebted to the classical tradition” (11).In my estimation, the volume has two major strengths. The first lies in its call for further research into this neglected sector of rhetorical history. The recent compilation Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric (2009) by Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, for example, is exceptional in its clarity and scope but includes little to no treatment of Irish contributions to those traditions. Similarly, George Kennedy’s Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition (1999)—perhaps the gold standard for histories of Western rhetoric and one of the late Kennedy’s greatest gifts to the field of rhetorical history—dedicates sections to rhetoric in medieval Byzantium, Italy, and France but not Ireland. (Of course, no text can or even should aim for complete coverage; however, the omission of Ireland seems conspicuous and consistent.) To address this lacuna in the field’s historical awareness, Stone makes the case for why future histories of European rhetoric should include Irish contributions. The book’s second strength is its synthesis of many sources of information about early Irish language use and instruction that, until now, have been distributed through many disciplines such as history, classics, and Celtic studies. Stone gathers this scattered research and brings it to bear on the limited textual evidence surviving from early Ireland to analyze rhetorically several Irish texts.The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland is organized into an introduction, six body chapters, and a conclusion calling for further research, including a list of understudied Irish texts. Each body chapter has at least one heading, which helps readers navigate the text.The opening “Introduction: Early Irish Rhetoric” aims to dispel common myths about the early Irish, such as, for example, that they did not identify as Celtic and that their culture was not cut off from Rome and mainland Europe. Learned, Latinate Christian culture arrived in Ireland “as early as the fifth century,” and, with the coming of the church, Ireland became part of “a continental community.” Given this direct avenue to Christian learning, “the rhetorical arts must have had a place in the great monasteries that rose to prominence in the sixth and seventh centuries” (13). Stone also includes a brief guide to the book’s working definition of rhetoric (24–26), drawn from Cicero, Quintilian, and the Ad Herennium but complemented with Kenneth Burke’s “dramatist definition of language as symbolic action that induces action and constructs social reality, that exerts through speech a persuasive action on an audience” (26).Chapter 1, “Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland and the Latin West,” argues that early Ireland should be considered a part of the Roman “frontier” and, in so doing, opens it to analysis of Roman, Romano-Gallic, and Romano-British influence. Trade networks were robust, so it stands to reason that education and literacy practices would have been international too (32). Ireland’s political structure also challenges histories of rhetoric that see the early Middle Ages as devoid of legislative and deliberative rhetoric owing to the rise of authoritarianism. Ireland of this period lacked an absolute monarch and was instead a collection of smaller kinship and religious communities.Chapter 2, “Learning in Ireland in the Sixth through Eighth Centuries,” is an overview of the available texts and traditions of the period. Here, Stone argues that “one must be wary of making transmission [of Roman rhetorical and grammatical texts] primary to the value of the texts” under analysis. For the Irish, “adaptation and innovation” are as important as whatever they inherited from textual circulation (46). On the authority of such sources as Bede, this chapter claims that Ireland must have had a robust system of education that included many books because English clerics studied in Ireland. Moreover, English scholars such as Aldhelm felt “a clear sense of competition” with Irish learning (54–56).Chapters 3 and 4—“St Patrick and the Rhetoric of Epistolography” and “A Rhetorical Analysis of Patrick’s Epistola ad Milites Coroticus”—are focused on Patrick. “Patrick’s opuscula,” Stone writes, “provide the earliest evidence of a rhetorical tradition in Ireland” (110). Chapter 3 includes a lengthy exploration of the scholarly debates over the historical Patrick—there may have been multiple Patricks, and the legend may incorporate biographical elements of another figure, Palladius. It and chapter 4 offer cogent analyses of Patrick’s letters, especially of their style, and they shine when Patrick’s rhetorical strategies are considered alongside texts known to be available, such as Paul’s epistles.Chapter 5, “The Hisperica famina,” is concerned with the titular text, or Western Orations, a seventh-century compilation of Latin orations that is anachronistically called a “textbook on rhetoric and composition” (155). The Hisperica famina brings attention to the contributions of Hisperic Latin (or Hiberno-Latin) to the history of rhetoric. Hisperic Latin is notable for its syntax, its linguistic playfulness (including neologisms and intentional archaisms), and an artificially elevated and bombastic style. The Hisperica famina includes “a list of topoi for rhetorical invention, akin to the themes for declamation,” thus shedding light on its possible classroom uses (183). This chapter, like chapter 4, speculates on the relations between these texts and the Greco-Roman system of rhetorical pedagogy known as progymnasmata. However, in order to make such claims with confidence, it would be necessary to engage in detail with the Greco-Roman source texts and their possible Irish descendants.Chapter 6, “Secular Learning and Native Traditions,” examines how traditions of the native Irish “learned class . . . were integrated with Latin learning in the formation of a syncretic, vernacular tradition” (191). To do that, Stone turns to “The Cauldron of Poetry and Learning,” an eighth-century prosimetrum related to the Nemed school, or “a poetic-legal school . . . representative of the wide range of learning of the filid,” a learned class of poets and seers in Irish society whom Stone compares to Hellenic rhetors (191–92). This text seems to mimic the scaffolding of Latin language instruction on the Continent, a three-tiered progression reminiscent of (and perhaps indebted to) the late classical progression from language acquisition to grammar and then, finally, to rhetoric—although, of course, adapted to Irish culture (217).As Stone reiterates throughout the book, The Rhetorical Arts in Late Antique and Early Medieval Ireland is not meant to be comprehensive. Instead, it should generate interest in early Irish education by highlighting several key texts and important historical developments. So readers looking for a synthetic history of early Irish rhetoric will need to keep looking. It is a valuable contribution to the history of Western rhetoric, and I hope that students will take up Stone’s call to investigate this fascinating era of rhetorical history and innovation.