Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the 'Poetria nova' across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (review)

Anyone interested in education and the teaching of writing in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance should read this book. Marjorie Woods's Classroom Commentaries brings the medieval and early modern rhetoric classroom before our eyes by studying the manuscript commentaries on Geoffrey de Vinsauf's Poetria nova, the most influential medieval textbook on the art of writing. Composed probably in England in the late twelfth century, it survives in more than 220 manuscripts written mostly between the thirteenth and the early fifteenth centuries. These are pre-eminently manuscripts for teaching; more than three quarters of them are glossed and almost half are commented extensively. Woods's book is based on a detailed study of almost all these manuscripts. It is a mine of dedicated scholarship, presented with clarity, wit, and verve. Woods shapes her study according to the surviving material; she does not speculate about periods or places for which we have no manuscript evidence. Her focus throughout is on the way in which Geoffrey and the teachers who used his book engaged the attention of adolescent boys on the techniques for writing attractive Latin verse and prose. Geoffrey succeeded because he thought clearly about the essential principles and because he composed moving, striking, and witty examples adapted to the tastes of his intended audience. Woods's book succeeds because it combines careful critical interrogation of the evidence, imaginative insight into the pedagogy of the writing classroom, and vivid presentation of examples. Her first chapter presents the structure and highlights of Geoffrey's text, with examples of the ways in which teachers introduced their pupils to it through different types of accessus and summaries. Chapter 2 uses the commentary of the Dominican Reiner von Cappel (died 1384), who taught in Saxony, as a guide to the school-level teaching of the Poetria nova in northern Europe. Reiner's teaching strategies are supported with parallel examples from commentaries that cannot be assigned to a particular place or author. The third chapter examines Italian commentaries from the thirteenth up to the mid-fifteenth century. Woods's main guides here are the substantial commentary by Bartholomew of Pisa (1262-1347) and the very popular (seven manuscripts) commentary by Pace of Ferrara, who was teaching in Padua by 1300 and who also wrote a commentary on the early humanist Albertino Mussato's tragedy Ecerinis. She compares their work with later Italian school commentaries by Guizzardo of Bologna (fl. 1289-1323), Giovanni Travesi (who was teaching in Pavia by 1388), Benedict of Aquileia, and Franciscello Mancinus, who taught in Naples in the early fifteenth century. Chapter 4 discusses commentaries that can be associated with universities in central Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and includes an analysis of written and reported versions of the commentary by Dybinus of Prague (died before 1387). Chapter 5 considers the afterlife of the Poetria nova in seventeenth-century manuscript collections and commentaries by Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) and the Dane Zacharias Lund (1608-1667). The value of the book is enhanced by attractive plates of different types of manuscript commentary and by lists of manuscripts and incipits. This is a work of original, profound, and thoughtful scholarship, presented in a most engaging and attractive manner.