Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion and Commentary (review)

270 Reviews the dealings between the king and his subjects points the way towards a fruitful re-appraisal of Henrician politics which breaks away from the old dichotomies of king or minister and puppet or puppet-master. Walker's 'fictions' are not entirely persuasive, but they represent a very welcome contribution to the historiography of early Tudor England. Paul E. J . H a m m e r Department of History University of N e w England Ward, John O, Ciceronian Rhetoric in Treatise, Scholion and Commenta (Typologie des Sources du Moyen Age Occidental 58), Turnhout, Brepols, 1995; paper; pp. 373; R.R.P. not known. The formal art of rhetoric exemplified by Cicero's speeches and writings has long been regarded as one of the most characteristic products of the Roman world. In the Middle Ages, according to received wisdom, this art was impractical and irrelevant, and was taught in a fragmented and truncated way, only returning to its former pre-eminence in the civic and humanist context of the Italian Renaissance. John Ward's authoritative analysis provides a forceful corrective to this view. Far from being irrelevant and marginalised in the Middle Ages, he argues, Ciceronian rhetoric proved to be widely applicable, particularly from the twelfth century onwards. In the 'pluralist and sophisticated world' of the ecclesiastical and royal courts and the Itatian communes, eloquence was necessary and the art of rhetoric was valuable. Throughout the Middle Ages, rhetoric also provided one of the main methods for the general education of clerics in their classical inheritance. The theme of this book is the continuity of the Ciceronian rhetorical tradition in the Middle Ages, which is clearly and extensively demonstrated. Ward also notes, in passing, the continuities between medieval and Renaissance rhetoric and suggests that previous views of a decisive break between the two need to be reconsidered. This book is not intended to be a general history of medieval rhetoric to replace James J . Murphy's 1974 monograph (Rhetoric in the Reviews 271 Middle Ages). Its coverage is carefuUy defined and limited. In the first place, Ward concentrates on the two main Ciceronian treatises used in the Middle Ages—Cicero's o w n De inventione and the pseudoCiceronian Ad Herennium—and discusses commentaries and glosses on them. Other authors w h o contributed independently to the medieval rhetorical tradition, such as Aristotle, Augustine, Boethius, Martianus Capella and Quintilian, are only sparingly treated. Secondly, only general discussions of Ciceronian ideas are covered. The apptication of Ciceronian rhetoric to subsidiary genres like versewriting (ars poetriae), letter-writing (ars dictaminis) and preaching (ar praedicandi) is excluded from consideration; other volumes in the series cover these genres separately. What Ward offers here is a detailed and exhaustive examination of the history and use of two works which were central to the medieval rhetorical tradition. H e digests and synthesises a prodigious amount of information to construct a descriptive handbook which wtil be an essential starting-point for future studies in this field. Its contribution to more analytical questions is also important, though these generally have to be traced from the subject index. W a r d has useful and perceptive comments on such topics as the relationship between Ciceronian rhetoric and Aristotelian dialectic, the place of the art of memory in the field of rhetoric, and the applicability of rhetorical issues to the study of the Bible, but these tend to be scattered throughout the volume. The relationship between rhetoric and the medieval law courts is judiciously examined at some length. Such limitations as the book has arise mainly from the series in which it appears. The Typologie des Sources, which has published more than seventy volumes since 1972 on different genres of medieval sources, imposes a fixed format on its authors. Each volume begins with a bibliography and a definition of the field being covered, and the genre is then considered under five rhain headings: its historical evolution, the critical rules applicable to it, its influence, editions of the major texts, and the cultural relevance of the subject. In this volume, these different sections are unevenly treated: W a r d devotes considerable space to the historical evolution of Ciceronian rhetoric...