Essays on Medieval Rhetoric


Book Description

Originally published between 1981 and 2003, the thirteen essays collected here cover topics in medieval rhetoric from its origins in late antiquity through the end of the Middle Ages. Most of the essays are concerned with the teaching of prose composition, especially the art of letter writing known as the ars dictaminis, and many of them focus on specific textbooks that were used for such instruction, in particular those composed in England from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. Individual essays are devoted to works by major figures such as Saint Augustine, Peter of Blois, and Geoffrey of Vinsauf; to teaching programmes at important academic centres such as Oxford and Bologna; and to such topics as the relationship between the art of letter writing and the art of poetry, the oral dimension of medieval epistolography, the manuscript traditions of influential textbooks, medieval genre terminology, and the position of medieval rhetoric within a continuous disciplinary history rooted in classical rhetoric.




Rhetoric Beyond Words


Book Description

This book analyses collaborative activities across the visual arts to show the power of non-verbal rhetoric in the Middle Ages.




Medieval Rhetoric


Book Description

This volume in the Routledge Medieval Casebooks series explores medieval rhetorical practices. Ten original essays examine the ways in which contemporary readers and scholars might employ rhetorical theory to illuminate underlying meanings in medieval texts. The contributors also explore how rhetoric was used as a means of textual innovation in the work of medieval authors such as Chaucer and his contemporaries.




Romance and Rhetoric


Book Description

The book series Disputatio publishes interdisciplinary scholarship on the intellectual cultural and intellectual history of the European Middle Ages. The medieval focus is construed broadly to encompass a chronology ranging from the end of the classical Roman age to the rise of the modern world. Disputatio seeks to promote scholarly dialogue among the various disciplines that study medieval texts and ideas and their diffusion and reception.




Readings in Medieval Rhetoric


Book Description

This authoritative anthology puts to rest the general impression that traditional rhetoric had little impact during the years between the death of St. Augustine and Bracciolini's rediscovery of Quintilian. It covers 36 rhetorical treatises.




Medieval Rhetoric


Book Description

This new volume in the Routledge Medieval Casebooks series explores medieval rhetorical practices. Ten original essays examine the ways in which contemporary readers and scholars might employ rhetorical theory to illuminate underlying meanings in medieval texts. The contributors also explore how rhetoric was used as a means of textual innovation in the work of medieval authors such as Chaucer and his contemporaries.




Public Declamations


Book Description

Martin Camargo, Professor of English, Medieval Studies, and Classics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a beloved teacher, mentor, colleague, and the scholar whose work this collection celebrates. With interests in defining 'medieval rhetoric', understanding the history of both literary and bureaucratic epistles, explaining the revival of rhetorical studies in fourteenth-century England, editing texts for teaching the trivium, and excavating performance pedagogies in medieval language classrooms, Carmago has paved the way for scholars in many fields, including educational and institutional history; literature, language, and manuscript studies; and rhetoric in the Middle Ages. This book pays tribute to his own ground-breaking research by presenting original and inventive new work in many of these fields. Authored by established scholars and innovative new researchers alike, the essays contained in this volume give significant scope to didactic medieval commentaries, theories of medieval rhetoric and language, literary epistles and the ars dictaminis, and poetry of various genres including romances and riddles, as well as to the classroom practices that all of these investigations infer. In keeping with Camargo's generosity in sharing resources, the authors hope that their essays in turn will provide encouragement and suggestions for further work.




Latin Rhetoric and Education in the Middle Ages and Renaissance


Book Description

The essays in this volume deal with the history of rhetoric and education for the thousand years from the early Middle Ages to the European Renaissance. They represent the author's pioneering efforts over four decades to piece together a kind of mosaic which will provide elements necessary to construct a history of that thousand years of language activity. Some essays deal with individual writers like Giles of Rome, Peter Ramus, Gulielmus Traversanus, or Antonio Nebrija, some focus on the influence of Cicero and Quintilian and other ancient sources. The essays dealing specifically with education open up different inquiries into the ways language use was promoted, and by whom. Others explore the relations between Latin rhetoric and medieval English literature and, finally, several deal with the impact of printing, a subject still not completely understood.




Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England


Book Description

Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health ” physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.




The Art of Vision


Book Description

One of the most common ways of setting the arts in parallel, at least from the literary side, is through the popular rhetorical device of ekphrasis. The original meaning of this term is simply an extended and detailed, lively description, but it has been used most commonly in reference to painting or sculpture. In this lively collection of essays, Andrew James Johnston, Ethan Knapp, and Margitta Rouse offer a major contribution to the study of text-image relationships in medieval Europe. Resisting any rigid definition of ekphrasis, The Art of Vision is committed to reclaiming medieval ekphrasis, which has not only been criticized for its supposed aesthetic narcissism but has also frequently been depicted as belonging to an epoch when the distinctions between word and image were far less rigidly drawn. Examples studied range from the eleventh through the seventeenth centuries and include texts written in Medieval Latin, Medieval French, Middle English, Middle Scots, Middle High German, and Early Modern English. The essays in this volume highlight precisely the entanglements that ekphrasis suggests and/or rejects: not merely of word and image, but also of sign and thing, stasis and mobility, medieval and (early) modern, absence and presence, the rhetorical and the visual, thinking and feeling, knowledge and desire, and many more. The Art of Vision furthers our understanding of the complexities of medieval ekphrasis while also complicating later understandings of this device. As such, it offers a more diverse account of medieval ekphrasis than previous studies of medieval text-image relationships, which have normally focused on a single country, language, or even manuscript.