Poetria Nova Research Articles

Amor y guerra en la poesía de Jorge Manrique. Análisis del decir “Castillo de amor”

Courtly love poetry from the 15th century has currently become one of the main fields of study of Medieval literature. Among the most prominent authors in this field is Jorge Manrique, author of 26 lyrical dits, and highly known for the Coplas a la muerte de su padre. This investigation proposes the study of the amplificatio resources as a constitutive element of the construction of the love discourse. The loving qualities of the lyrical lover are emphasized in the “Castillo de amor” dit through the repetitive use of the collatio occulta and the prosopopoeia, amplificatio techniques defined by Godofredo de Vinsauf in Poetria Nova.

중세 ‘프랑스 시학’과 조프루아 드 뱅소프의 『새로운 시학』

중세 ‘프랑스 시학’과 조프루아 드 뱅소프의 『새로운 시학』

Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Master Trope: The Development of the Doctrine of Transsumptio

In this article, I trace the evolution of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s doctrine of transsumptio as it developed from his Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi (late 12th century) to the Poetria nova (1202–1213). Although scholars have conflated transsumptio with translatio (or metaphor), this article argues that transsumptio is Geoffrey’s attempt to schematize how occupying a position of difference (or the transference of the self into an alternate mode of being) reveals metaphorical possibility in language. I close by imputing the development of Geoffrey’s doctrine of transsumptio to a reinvestigation of the Rhetorica ad Herennium between composing his two major treatises.

Speaking “Amys” in the Franklin's Tale: Rhetoric, Truth, and the Poetria nova

Abstract The Franklin's Prologue and Tale offer a model of poetic image-making derived from Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova. The Franklin's exploration of the colors of rhetoric in his prologue anticipates the illusionist's ability to manipulate the black rocks in the tale. In manipulating language and the natural world, this system of poetry threatens to obscure truth. As a result, the Franklin's Tale is as much about poetic illusion as magical illusion, and as much about factual truth (or reality) as ethical truth.

‘Inculcation’ in Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetics and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

GEOFFREY of Vinsauf employs inculcatio as a literary term of art both in his Poetria Nova and in his Documentum de Arte Versificandi. The word has its origin in the verb inculcare, meaning literally ‘to tread down’, and by the time of Classical Latin this verb had already developed a transferred sense, ‘to impress (an idea, etc., upon a person’s mind), din in, drive home’.1 Hence the noun inculcatio could be used, like its English derivative, to refer to ‘the action of impressing on the mind by forcible admonition, or frequent repetition’.2 This is the sense in which Geoffrey of Vinsauf employs the word. Both the Poetria Nova and the Documentum introduce their accounts of inculcatio rather awkwardly in connection with another topic, determinatio.3 In Poetria Nova, Geoffrey observes that, since individual words are no more than the raw material (‘mater hyle’, 1762) of discourse, they commonly stand to be ‘determined’—by the addition, that is, of other words which will specify their bearing in the particular context. Thus adjectives may be determined by nouns, as in Geoffrey’s illustrative line about a miser: ‘Plenus opum, vacuus virtutum, avidissimus rerum’ (‘Full of riches, empty of virtues, most desirous of possessions’, 1785). It is strings of parallel phrases such as this that prompt Poetria Nova to speak of inculcatio:

From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 by Christopher Cannon

Reviewed by: From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400 by Christopher Cannon Michael Calabrese Christopher Cannon. From Literacy to Literature: England, 1300–1400. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Pp. xv, 297. $55.00. In this handsome volume from Oxford, Christopher Cannon works into book form material from six of his previous publications in such journals as The Yearbook of Langland Studies, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, New Medieval Literature, and ELH: English Literary History, now molded together with new material and a new rhetorical framework appropriate to a monograph, convenient for those wanting a "greatest hits" compilation of Cannon's engaging work (with bonus tracks) in the field of grammar and learning. Unifying the current volume, Cannon shows throughout how the various exercises learned at school equipped the major Ricardian poets for poetic creation in English. The book will mainly appeal to scholars and advanced graduate students, but the chapters that offer concrete examples from the major poets (Chaucer, Langland, and Gower) may be useful for classroom teaching, as they illustrate how poets cleverly transformed school exercises into some of the most famous, beloved, and intriguing moments of Middle English literature in texts such as the Wife of Bath's and Pardoner's prologues, The Tale of Melibee, the Monk's portrait, the Troilus, endless episodes in Piers Plowman, and many other examples that Cannon marshals in detailed comparisons of the school texts and the poets' verses. For the schoolboys, we learn, were inherently poets in training; as Cannon writes, "if poetry is usually the culmination of literacy training, it is almost always that training's first step" (2). In reading all these chapters collectively, one certainly does get a sense of what it was like to be a medieval schoolboy, and the monograph as it now stands makes a major contribution to our understanding of medieval grammar schools and their role in educating some of the major canonical poets in English medieval literature. Chapter 1's section "Fiant Latina!" (Let there be Latin!), argues that students were (despite what medieval chroniclers have said) trained in "a fundamentally Latin pedagogy" (37). And the poets later wrote major works in English because of their growing awareness that English too has a grammar that can be understood and put to use creatively. Cannon's coinage "grammaticalization" may not be elegant, but it encapsulates the processes of learning and creativity at work in the schoolboys turned poets, as Cannon takes us beyond the traditional understanding of education as training in ethics to reveal it also as "a primer in literary [End Page 316] possibility" (14). "There is a remarkably straight line," Cannon argues, from the schoolbooks that survive … through the agile understandings of Chaucer, Gower, and Langland, to the techniques that made the literature these three writers produced distinctive" (15). Chapter 2, "The Ad Hoc School," reconsiders the texts and even the physical structures of the schools, arguing that the notion of a standardized curriculum and mode of instruction have been overstated, for education was much more improvisatory than previously thought, as a collection called "Cato" might not even include Cato. Cannon continues: "Whenever a medieval person had occasion to write about how he learned to read and write, in fact, he almost always described a local tutelary relationship rather than an institution" (59). In "Schoolboy Improvisation" Cannon argues that certain classic texts about writing that we usually associate with Chaucer such as the Poetria nova are works Chaucer would have studied later in life, for he would have already acquired instruction in the making of poetry in grammar school. Cannon then follows with a series of examples of school verses made in English where it's hard to tell the difference between an exercise and a poem, displaying the birth of poetic invention arising out of exercises in learning Latin. In fact many of the free-standing poems we "now value as literature" were produced in the mode of a schoolroom translation exercise, so learning Latin and creating verses in English were taught and practiced simultaneously. For this reason "the idea that he might write English verse of his own was almost impossible for such a schoolboy...

Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England ed. by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (review)

Reviewed by: Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England ed. by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway Kathleen Smith Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway, eds. Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Pp. vii + 341. $74.95 cloth, $14.95 CD. This volume in honor of Anne Middleton collects essays on a variety of approaches to medieval literary style, with an emphasis on the works of Chaucer and Langland. Written in the spirit of the festschrift, a number of the essays critically engage with both Middleton’s work and the practice of new formalism in medieval literary studies, offering a welcome contribution to the discipline. As the editors Frank Grady and Andrew [End Page 314] Galloway caution: medievalists began to turn their attention to the formal elements of style long before the movement of new formalism supposedly began. The volume nevertheless assembles a collection of essays with the goal of pursuing the literary as such. The book is divided into two sections, with the first group of essays focusing on vernacular literary style as it employs and often departs from Latin literary style. The second half focuses more exclusively on English vernacular expressions of style. The volume has been published by Ohio State University Press as part of the series Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture, which includes theoretically inflected works on animal studies, gender, law, translation studies, and politics. The essays largely exercise, to borrow Levinson’s phrase, a kind of activist formalism, carefully attuned to historical context but never dominated by it in the practice of literary analysis. Rita Copeland’s excellent discussion of the shift in the reception of Horace’s Ars poetica from the Middle Ages to the early modern period inaugurates the collection. The Ars poetica, she argues, moved from the status of grammar school manual to universalizing classic of critical theory because of a shift in its use and therefore its perceived status. Once other style manuals, such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, became more frequently employed in the classroom, Horace’s poem was dislodged from the practical and repetitive doldrums of schoolwork. For this reason, the Ars poetica could be “rediscovered” as a humanist classic in the sixteenth century since it was no longer connected to the lower status of grammar school composition manual. Copeland’s essay, which builds on her earlier work on rhetoric and pedagogy, offers valuable insight into discussions of style by examining the reception of theories of style. Ralph Hanna employs a similar methodology for thinking about genre in “Speculum Vitae and the Form of Piers Plowman” and also offers a compelling response to Nicholas Watson’s influential theory of vernacular theology. While Watson had emphasized the growth of a culture of censorship at the hands of Archbishop Thomas Arundel after 1409 as the major factor in shaping English vernacular writings about theology, Hanna suggests that perhaps simply a change in tastes might be the factor that best explains why catechetical works such as the Speculum vitae fell out of favor with writers. These texts had exhausted the possibilities for writing about virtues and vices within the genre of catechetical writing and Hanna argues that writers like Langland sought new [End Page 315] forms for thinking about practical or applied religious issues. Hanna’s approach offers readers a theory that should spark further debate on the genres of religious writing that emerged in England in the later Middle Ages. Katherine Zieman’s essay, “Escaping the Whirling Wicker: Ricardian Poetics and Narrative Voice in The Canterbury Tales,” in addition to advancing excellent analyses for those who work in the field, also gives an overview of scholarly debate on character and narrative voice in Chaucer that would be especially useful to graduate students. She responds to Middleton’s idea of “public poetry” in Ricardian literature, focusing on the rhetorical strategies Chaucer employs to create an impression of a fully realized character. The Man of Law’s Tale offers moments of narrative interruption that call attention to the narrator, and in doing so, create a sense of character. These moments of interruption, however, should also...

Review: Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe, by Marjorie Curry Woods

Review: Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe, by Marjorie Curry Woods

Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe by Marjorie Curry Woods

Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe by Marjorie Curry Woods

Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the “Poetria nova” across Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the “Poetria nova” across Medieval and Renaissance Europe

The Late Fourteenth-Century Renaissance of Anglo-Latin Rhetoric

AbstractMost of the medieval arts of poetry and prose were written before the middle of the thirteenth century, but their dissemination was not uniform in all parts of Europe. In England, the surviving copies of a work such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova taper off notably toward the end of the thirteenth century, and the numbers do not begin to pick up again until the last quarter of the fourteenth century. This pattern is no accident of preservation but reflects a significant revival of interest in Latin rhetoric and literature, centered at Oxford in the late fourteenth century. The characteristic literary materials and rhetorical methods of this renaissance resonated beyond the university environment and are reflected with striking precision in the references to rhetoric scattered throughout the vernacular poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer.

What's Myrie about the Prose of the Parson's Tale?

In the prologue to the longest of the Canterbury Tales, the Parson offers to tell “a myrie tale in prose” (X 46).1 In the tale that follows, the Parson appears partly to renege on his word. I say partly because, although the Parson does tell a “tale in prose,” one wonders what justifies calling his elaborate exposition of penance “myrie.” Tracing Chaucer’s various uses of “a myrie tale” in the Canterbury Tales, Lois Ebin observes that the Parson offers “the final definition” of that expression: “it is a tale which is explicit in its ‘sentence,’ one which we must take seriously, and, to use the Parson’s repeated phrase, ‘understonde.’”2 At the same time, Ebin observes that Chaucer invests the word myrie with the additional sense of fruitfulness found in the Host’s command that the Parson be “fructuous”—an adjective that in Chaucer’s time meant “not only ‘fruitful’ or ‘fertile’ but also ‘beneficial,’ ‘productive,’ ‘effective,’ ‘yielding good results,’ [and] ‘edifying.’”3 Much of the extensive scholarship on the Parson’s Tale substantiates these two senses of myrie (both sententious and fructuous) by reading the tale proper against its Latin penitential sources. In what represents a recent critical consensus, Richard Newhauser writes that the tale “belongs to a specific genre among a mass of late-medieval religious prose, that of the

Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Memorial Verses

Throughout his career Geoffrey of Vinsauf composed highly rhetorical poems that dramatized and thus memorialized the emotions associated with England’s (and his own) greatest triumphs and tragedies. His most frequently quoted poem, the lament for King Richard I, probably began as just such a composition. Geoffrey’s occasional pieces clearly and succinctly embody the grand poetic ambitions behind his Poetria nova. This essay sheds light on the ten shorter poems that have been attributed to Geoffrey both by identifying their characteristic rhetorical strategies and by translating them into English for the first time.

In Search of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Lost “Long Documentum”

The principal source of the fourteenth-century rhetoric textbook known as the Tria sunt is Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi, but the anonymous compiler may have used a version of Geoffrey’s work that was composed in the early thirteenth century and differs in important ways from the extant version (written in 1198/99) that was edited by Faral. Examined in the context of Geoffrey’s other rhetorical treatises, especially the contemporary Poetria nova, the traces of the revised Documentum that are preserved in the Tria sunt reveal the probable structure and contents of the longer and now presumably lost final version of Geoffrey’s rhetoric textbook in prose.

Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe. By Marjorie Curry Woods (Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2010) 367 pp. $ 59.95 cloth

<i>Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria Nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe.</i> By Marjorie Curry Woods (Columbus, Ohio State University Press, 2010) 367 pp. $ 59.95 cloth

Geoffrey of Vinsauf , Poetria nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims. Rev. ed. Introduction by Martin Camargo. (Mediaeval Sources in Translation, 49.) Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010. Paper. Pp. v, 95. $15.95. First ed. published in 1967.Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the “Poetria nova” across Medieval and Renaissance Europe. (Text and Context.) Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press,

Geoffrey of Vinsauf , <i>Poetria nova</i>, trans. Margaret F. Nims. Rev. ed. Introduction by Martin Camargo. (Mediaeval Sources in Translation, 49.) Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2010. Paper. Pp. v, 95. $15.95. First ed. published in 1967.Marjorie Curry Woods, <i>Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the “Poetria nova” across Medieval and Renaissance Europe</i>. (Text and Context.) Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press,

Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the 'Poetria nova' across Medieval and Renaissance Europe

Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the 'Poetria nova' across Medieval and Renaissance Europe

From Liber versuum to Poetria nova: The Evolution of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Masterpiece

Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s early thirteenth-century Poetria nova was the preeminent textbook on rhetorical composition in prose and verse for nearly three centuries. Before he created his masterpiece Geoffrey had taught for some twenty-five years and written two textbooks in prose. The popularity of the poem that Geoffrey wrote in response to King Richard Lionheart’s sudden death in 1199 seems to have instilled a new sense of his poetic powers that sparked a creative re-engagement with his pedagogy and its sources. The immediate result was an anthology of rhetorical poems, as suggested by references to it as a “book of verses” in the anonymous Tria sunt; but within a few years this had evolved into a concise and memorable textbook in hexameter verse that came to be regarded as the legitimate heir to Horace’s Ars poetica.

Marjorie Curry Woods. Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Text and Context. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. xlii + 367 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $59.95. ISBN: 978–0–8142–1109–0.

Marjorie Curry Woods. Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Text and Context. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2010. xlii + 367 pp. index. append. illus. bibl. $59.95. ISBN: 978–0–8142–1109–0.

ALEXANDRA GILLESPIE, Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books 1472-1557.: MARION TURNER, Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fouteenth-Century London.

NEAR the end of the first book of Troilus and Criseyde Pandarus famously offers Troilus amorous advice in words that paraphrase the opening of Geoffrey de Vinsauf's Poetria Nova. ‘For everi wight that hath an hous to founde / Ne renneth naught the werk for to bygynne / with rakel hond, but he wol bide a stounde, / And send his hertes line out fro withinne / Aldirfirst his purpos for to wynne’ (I.1065–9). Vinsauf's advice was clearly designed for the rhetorician and not for the lover, and it is to the poet, rather than his protagonist, that the architectural metaphor most obviously applies. It is Chaucer, and not Troilus, who stills his impetuous hand, measuring out the work beforehand. The building of cities, of poets, and of books, and the commonality of the language used to describe them are the subject of Alexandra Gillespie's Print Culture and the...