Essays on Medieval Rhetoric

Martin Camargo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351219365
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire médiévale et du début des temps modernes

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.

IX

Tria sunt: The Long and the Short of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi

Sometime during the third quarter of the twelfth century, while teaching grammar and rhetoric in the schools of Orléans, Matthew of Vendôme apparently invented a new genre of academic text, the comprehensive guide to composing Latin verse and prose. Most of the doctrine in Matthew’s Ars versificatoria had been available to medieval teachers for centuries, in rhetorical treatises such as the De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium and above all in Horace’s Ars poetica and the medieval commentaries on it; but Matthew’s selection and arrangement of those familiar materials clearly filled a need. In the course of the thirteenth century, the grammar teachers Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Gervase of Melkley, John of Garland, and Eberhard the German composed similar treatises, one of which, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, was among the most versatile and influential textbooks of the late Middle Ages.¹

With a single exception, all of the Latin arts of poetry and prose have had at least one modern edition and have been translated into English at least once.² The one treatise that is still available only in manuscript was known to the scribes who copied it and to the medieval students and teachers who used it by its incipit, “Tria sunt”; but ever since Noël Denholm-Young pointed out its existence in 1934,³ it has been known to modern scholars as the longer and as yet unprinted version of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi or the “long Documentum.” Edmond Faral had not known of it in 1924, when he published his edition of twelfth- and thirteenth-century arts of poetry—including the “short Documentum,”⁴ and little notice was taken of it until some forty years after Denholm-Young’s essay had appeared. In his 1974 edition of John of Garland’s Parisiana poetria, Traugott Lawler devoted an appendix to the relationship between that work and the Tria sunt, from which he edited a few passages for purposes of comparison.⁵ Also in 1974, Margaret E Nims, the translator of Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, published an essay that drew on the Tria sunt’s treatment of metaphor;⁶ and apparently around the same time she began work on a critical edition of the Tria sunt. Nims’s work on the edition was interrupted because of illness, however, and at the time of her death, in 1995, she had completed only a handwritten transcript of one manuscript, with a partial set of variants from a second manuscript.

Despite the absence of a printed edition of the entire text, the Tria sunt has attracted increased attention during the 1990s. The beginning of this new interest was marked by two substantial treatments of the treatise, one by me in 1988, and the other by Karsten Friis-Jensen in 1990, each of which included lengthy extracts from the unprinted text.⁷ Although Friis-Jensen and I have since written again on the Tria sunt, in studies that appeared in 1995, each of us has approached the treatise mainly from the perspective of our own particular interests—mine in the ars dictaminis and Friis-Jensen’s in the medieval commentaries on Horace’s Ars poetica.⁸ However, with Margaret Nims’s death, I have inherited the task of producing a much-needed critical edition and, in the process, of evaluating the Tria sunt as an autonomous work with its own unique purpose and history. The critical edition is still some years from completion, but examination of all surviving manuscripts and preliminary comparison of the Tria sunt’s contents with those of its chief sources have enabled me to clarify the authorship, date, and transmission of this important treatise.

The number of surviving manuscript copies suggests that the Tria sunt was among the most popular works of its kind. In addition to one large and one small fragment, the treatise is preserved complete in eleven manuscripts:

Berlin, Staatsbibliothek, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, MS Lat. qu. 515, fols. 69r–132v (s. xv in.; England)

Cambridge, Pembroke MS 287, fols. 105ra–164vb (s. xv; England)

Cambridge, Sidney Sussex College, MS 56, pp. 1–148 (s. xv; Durham and/or Durham College, Oxford)⁹

Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.14.22, fols. 49r–91r (s. xiv/xv; England)

Chicago, Newberry Library, MS 55, fols. 1r–90v (s. xv; England)

Douai, Bibliothèque Municipale, MS 764, fols. lr–108r (5. xiv/xv; Oxford)

London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra B.vi, fols. 33r–87v (s. xiv/xv; Oxford)

Oxford, Balliol College, MS 263, fols. 7vb–32rb (s. xiv/xv; England)

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 147, fols. 76ra–84va (s. xv; England; imperfect at end)

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 707, fols. 36r–85r (s. xv; Oxford)

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D.893, fol. 55r–v (s. xv¹; England; fragment)

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 65, fols. lr–72v (s. xv in.; Canterbury College, Oxford)

Worcester Cathedral, Chapter Library, MS Q.79, fols. 81r–158r (s. xv; England)

Still another manuscript, Cambridge, St. John’s College, MS E18 ( James 155), fols. 93r–96v (s. xv; Oxford), contains an incomplete synopsis of the Tria sunt that breaks off near the end of chapter 3.¹⁰

A rearranged and somewhat revised version of several chapters from the Tria sunt, made at Oxford in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, survives in an additional five manuscript copies:

London, British Library, MS Harley 670, fols. 3r–10r (s. xv med.; Oxford)

London, British Library, MS Harley 941, fols. 80r–90r (s. xv med.; Oxford)¹¹

London, British Library, MS Royal 12.B.xvii, fols. lr–43r (s. xv med.; Norfolk?)¹²

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Rawlinson D.232, fols. 15r–42r (s. xv med.; Cambridge?)¹³

Westminster Abbey, Library of the Dean and Chapter, MS 20, fols. 21r–37r (s. xv; Westminster?)

While these numbers pale alongside the nearly two hundred extant copies of the Poetria nova, they are more impressive when set against the statistics for other arts of composition in prose. Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria, for example, survives in eight complete or largely complete copies, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s (short) Documentum de modo et arte dictandi et versificandi in five, John of Garland’s Parisiana poetria in five, and Gervase of Melkley’s De arte versificatoria et modo dictandi in four. Mere numbers can be deceptive, however, and one very striking difference between the transmission of the Tria sunt and that of the other prose treatises may prove more significant than quantitative measures of popularity. There is at least one thirteenth-century copy of each of the other four prose treatises; but on the basis of the handwriting, no copy of the Tria sunt can be dated earlier than the last quarter of the fourteenth century, and most of them date from the first half of the fifteenth century. This unusually compact time frame may turn out to be related to an equally restricted provenance. The copies of the Tria sunt whose provenance is known were all either produced at Oxford or belonged to persons who are known to have studied at Oxford, and many of the other copies show signs of an Oxford connection as well. Judging only by the provenance of the extant manuscripts, the popularity of the Tria sunt appears to have been largely a phenomenon of the schools at Oxford during the first half of the fifteenth century.

To evaluate the significance of this pattern of transmission, one need only contrast it with the very different pattern for the shorter Documentum edited by Faral. This work is preserved complete in three manuscripts and nearly complete in another two manuscripts:

Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 217, fols. 209ra–218rb (s. xiii; Worcester)

Durham Cathedral, Dean and Chapter Library, MS C.IV.25, fols. 103r–110v (s. xv in.; Durham)

Glasgow, Hunterian Library, MS Hunterian V.8.14 (olim 511), fols. 46r–67r (s. xiii in.; East Midlands)¹⁴

London, British Library, MS Royal 12.B.xvii, fols. 73r–86v (s. xv med.; imperfect at end; Norfolk?)

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS nouv. acq. lat. 699, fols. 36r–58v (s. xv¹; imperfect at beginning; Beverley?)¹⁵

The earliest copy—Faral’s base text—is in Glasgow, MS Hunterian V.8.14, a manuscript written during the first quarter of the thi...