The inextricable union of music to principles of classical rhetoric in the baroque period is generally recognized, although a similar relationship in much of the music of the Renaissance has received far less attention from music historians. Rhetoric was, of course, one of the essential thrusts of the basic educational system of Europe throughout several centuries, losing its influence slowly only in the second half of the eighteenth century. This discipline of such universality had a natural and direct influence on baroque music, which was primarily a word-oriented art. Until recently, most music historians chose to ignore this relationship, although a small group of German scholars of preeminence such as Kretzschmar and Schering had proved the primacy of rhetoric to music theory and aesthetics of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even Manfred Bukofzer, who early in his career attempted to discuss the extra-musical, essentially rhetorical basis of baroque music in his article, Allegory in Baroque (1939), quickly passed over the relevance of rhetoric to music in his book, Music in the Baroque Era (1947), and his brief explanation confused the terminology and its application to music. The basic purpose of the rhetorical doctrine created by Greek and Latin writers of antiquity is to instruct the orator in the means of controlling and directing the emotions of his audience, or in the language of both classic rhetoric books and baroque music treatises, to enable the speaker (i.e., the composer) to move the affections (=emotions) of his listeners. It is clear, therefore, that the concept of the Affections arises in baroque musical terminology as part of the rhetorical concepts these composers and theorists adopted so earnestly. The widespread appeal of rhetorical terminology for writers on music through more than two centuries included not just the use of the concept of the Affections, but also the whole range of technical language such as