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

Marjorie Curry Woods's Classroom Commentaries is a tour de force. Not only does it convey the richness, flexibility, and depth of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova (PN) as a tool for the teaching of grammar, rhetoric, poetics, letter writing, and preaching, but it also performs medieval pedagogy in a way that is both compelling and engaging. Unlike other studies that deal with the doctrine expounded in Geoffrey's text from the perspective of the modern critic who brings to it concerns about literary culture and theory shaped by the modern academy, Woods explores the meaning and method of the PN as it was understood and practiced by medieval teachers and students, and demonstrates its relevance for the teaching of composition in the context of the twenty-first-century university.

Classroom Commentaries begins with an introductory chapter that fulfills the role of accessus in medieval commentaries, providing a textured, up-to-date discussion of many basic issues scholars have debated, such as authorship, audience, the PN's relationship to its sources, its notable manuscript legacy, structure, and basic method. In addition to clearly setting out the historical, intellectual, and pedagogical context of the PN, Woods's thorough approach to this prefatory material demonstrates the degree to which medieval teachers were attuned to its efficacy and versatility. They commented on Geoffrey's techniques, such as witty wordplay or the insertion of a comic example at the end of a series of descriptions, for holding the attention of adolescent male readers; on the appropriate fullness of the doctrine Geoffrey teaches in comparison with its sources: the condensed obscurity of Horace's Ars poetica or the unwieldy, bloated nature of the Rhetorica ad Herennium; on the mnemonic utility of the PN's verse format; on its emphatic, easily digestible lessons where content and form reinforce and mirror each other; on its creative, dramatic use of dialogue; and on its ability to speak simultaneously to poetics, rhetoric, and virtually any genre of productive discourse. While it might seem simple to us, medieval commentators found in the Poetria nova an inexhaustible source of doctrine (Woods calls it a "goldmine," p. 21) that could be approached from multiple perspectives on a wide variety of levels.

After providing this introductory intellectual grid culled from both medieval commentaries and modern scholarship, in the rest of the book Woods takes the reader into the medieval classroom, reproducing the experiences of students learning the text for the first time as well as of those seeking to appropriate the text in the context of higher learning. Chapter Two, focusing on basic commentaries drawn from all over Europe from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, highlights those aspects of the text that medieval teachers wanted to draw out for their students, and explains the methods such commentaries used to accomplish their goals. Using paraphrase and concentrating on small bits of text, these commentaries convey a fairly uniform content, but the pedagogical methods they employ—teaching by association, analogy, repetition, etymology, or focus on Geoffrey's examples—are intended to facilitate both understanding and assimilation of the PN in a variety of communicative situations. Woods proposes that one of the commentaries, by Reiner von Cappel, was intended as part of the training for future preachers, and that the stress on the word sermo is applicable not only to discourse in general, but also to "sermon." Like the commentators she is analyzing, Woods's chapter moves sequentially through the text, breaking it down into small, digestible portions, thereby reproducing, in part, the experience of the novice medieval learner.

Chapter Three explores the Poetria nova as an early humanist text through an examination of Italian commentaries from the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries aimed at intermediate or more advanced students. In this commentary tradition the PN was treated as part of a program of instilling the textual and analytic skills required for an advanced, sophisticated appropriation of classical and classicizing Latin...