The Scope of the Treatment of Composition in the Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Arts of Poetry

Abstract

STUDIES of the twelfthand thirteenth-century arts of poetry have heretofore emphasized similarities in the treatises in order to provide a unified picture of instruction in the writing of poetry in the schools of the time.' This was justified by the need to demonstrate the significance of these works to the scholarly world. Such a presentation had however certain drawbacks: there is more emphasis on similarities than on differences among the treatises; and, stemming partly from this tendency, the length of an author's treatment of different subjects more often serves as a gauge of their relative importance than do really significant indications, such as the general plan of the treatise, the emphasis placed by the author himself on different parts of his work, and deliberate subordination of one subject to another. Thus the means of amplification and abbreviation, the three styles and the two forms of ornamentation, and description generally those parts of rhetoric included by mediaeval grammarians and rhetoricians under the heading elocutio were adequately summarized and explained. But the treatment of invention and disposition seemed to most critics completely inadequate; here the authors had very little to say of real significance.2 That they say little is certainly true; and, as the same scholars found in studying the arts of poetry, their instruction is not very inspired or inspiring. There is the well-known distinction between natural and artificial order (in Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland), as well as the alternative zeugma and hypozeuxis (in Matthew of Vend6me and Eberhard the German) as recommended ways to begin a poem. Still, an important problem is raised by the little that is said about disposition. How, in fact, does one explain two fundamentally distinct ways to begin a poem, the one pure embellishment and related to the sentence structure of the first few lines, the other more truly compositional in that it is concerned with the orderly arrangement of the poem's contents? That Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland say nothing of zeugma and hypozeuxis may not seem surprising. But how is one to explain the total silence of Matthew of Vend6me on natural and artificial order? This concept was well established in mediaeval poetics by Matthew's time,3 and he must have known of it if he studied composition under Bernard