The Waning of Medieval Ars Dictaminis

Abstract

© The International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Rhetorica, Volume XIX, Number 2 (Spring 2001). Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St, Ste 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223,USA T he Žve essays in this special issue grew out of papers presented at the Twelfth Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (Amsterdam, July 1999), at the session entitled “What Killed the Ars Dictaminis? and When?” four of them ably chaired by Emil Polak. That session originated in a conversation I had with Malcolm Richardson in1997, at the previous ISHR conference, in Saskatoon. We had just discovered that his research on practitioners of vernacular letter writing and mine on teachers of Latin letter writing in late-medieval England independently suggested that in England the ars dictaminis had experienced something like what paleontologists call an “extinction event” around 1470. We wondered whether the suddenness of the demise was unique to England. Beyond that, we wondered why the mostwidely diffused and inuential variety of practical rhetoric during the later Middle Ages, an art thatwas highly teachable, adaptable to almost any institutional setting, aligned with key disciplines such as grammar and the law, should have disappeared at all. Having served the communication needs of a broad range of professionals throughout Europe since the late eleventh century, had the ars dictaminis simply worn itself out or had new needs arisen to which it could no longer respond? With good reason, more scholarship has focused on the origins of the ars dictaminis than on its demise. It is much simpler to identify the Žrst medieval treatise that teaches how to compose letters than to decide which letter-writing treatise is the last in that tradition. Few of the surviving ancient treatises on rhetoric provide any explicit instructionon letters: in theLatin tradition, the brief chapter on letters that concludes the Ars rhetorica of Julius Victor (fourth century AD) is virtually unique. While some such pedagogy clearly existed in