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.

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

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.

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West, from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages, represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring that rhetorical history between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle's rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.

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.

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.