Poetry, the Arts of Discourse, and the Discourse of the Arts

An art, as Lucian doth define it, is nothing else but a collection, or, as it were, a body of certain precepts which are practised and used for some profitable end and purpose in man's life.

—Abraham Fraunce, The Shepherds' Logic (c. 1585)¹

Lucian of Samosata's definition, from his dialogue The Parasite, reached Abraham Fraunce through the mediation of sources that were well known in the scholarly circles of the England of his time: Philipp Melanchthon's Erotemata dialectices (1549) and Johannes Piscator's In P. Rami dialecticam animadversiones (1580), the latter an extensive commentary of Petrus Ramus's influential Dialecticae libri duo (1556).² Derived from a Stoic conception widely accepted by sixteenth-century humanist pedagogues, this definition understands technē or ars as a rationally organised collection of rules for the teaching or learning of a specific field of human knowledge. Renaissance pedagogy laid special emphasis on the cultivation of those instrumental abilities of the human mind that may be categorised under the umbrella term 'discourse'. Logic, grammar, and rhetoric are 'arts of discourse' (of both ratio and oratio) inasmuch as they devise systems containing definitions, divisions, precepts, and practical exercises whose aim is to instil in the learner habits of apt reasoning, speaking, reading, and writing.

The pedagogical programmes of the trivium resulted in the mass production of students' primers, epitomes, practical handbooks, and more elaborate treatises in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe. Fraunce, a scholar at St John's, Cambridge, a law student at Gray's Inn, London, and a member of the thriving literary coteries led by Gabriel Harvey and Philip Sidney, developed his views in a work whose more-than-a-hundred illustrative quotations from Edmund Spenser's The Shepheardes Calender (1579) claimed for poetry a privileged place in the discussion and learning of the arts. His continued efforts in two later treatises published in 1588 expanded the use of Spenser's eclogues to Sidney's Arcadia and to an equally significant choice of Greek, Latin, French, Italian, and Spanish examples.³ In doing so, he was pointedly adding English to other vernaculars as literary vehicles for a scholarly practice that most of his European sources had reserved for the classical languages.

This Special Issue of Parergon follows the lead of this 'minor' Elizabethan in assessing the status of poetry in light of Renaissance theoretical discussions of language and discourse. A common thread in its articles is the reciprocating connections between poetry and the arts; that is, the uses of poetry in the shaping and advancement of discourse-orientated disciplines and the concerns of these and other disciplines with the training and praxis of the poet. Understood as a special division of language use, poetry not only received significant attention in the context of the arts of discourse, but stood in a special, and occasionally difficult, relation to them. In this period, poetry was treated variously as an art in itself, as the subject of the specific art of poetics, as a valuable mode of discourse illuminating the discussions of grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and as an object deserving the attention of disciplines as varied as medicine or ethics.

Some of the articles in this Special Issue address various ways in which the traditional arts of discourse touch on poetry specifically or on forms of imaginative expression associated with the faculties of the poet. Others scrutinise the structure, contents, scope, and uses of works that could be specifically categorised as artes poeticae, that is, treatises or manuals containing precepts or advice for the study and practice of poetry. Others assess specific transformations of poetic doctrine into practice, or, conversely, the use of poetry to exemplify ideas and precepts of the arts. And still others explore the alternative Renaissance perception, usually formulated in disciplines outside the trivium, that poetic language somehow exceeds the boundaries of art, and therefore its very nature defies easy systematisation into a rational body of precepts. As a whole, the seven articles in this issue explore theoretical and practical questions dealing with...