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Reviewed by:
  • Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475
  • Gregory Hays
Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter, eds. Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric: Language Arts and Literary Theory, AD 300–1475. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii, 972. £95.00; $175.00.

The student who approaches the history of literary theory from existing sourcebooks could be excused for seeing the Middle Ages as dark. To take only one example, the latest (2005) edition of Hazzard Adams and Leroy Searle's Critical Theory since Plato finds space for Strabo and Plotinus among the ancients and Ludovico Castelvetro among the moderns, but includes no author between Boethius in the sixth century and Aquinas in the thirteenth. This willful erasure of seven centuries of thought seems to require explanation. In part, surely, it betrays the persistence of a Renaissance view of intellectual history, in which after a thousand years of arid scholasticism the insights of Horace and Pseudo-Longinus were revivified by Boccaccio and Sidney. But it probably also reflects the recalcitrant nature of the medieval material. Foundational authors like Servius, Priscian, and Isidore deal with the minutiae of Latin etymology and semantics. Reading them in English is a bit like reading a French version of Fowler's Modern English Usage or Strunk and White's Elements of Style. Much medieval theory is embedded in commentaries and glosses, often anonymous and hard to date. Many of these still lack a [End Page 314] reliable modern edition. So do some important freestanding texts like Alexander Neckam's Corrogationes Promethei.

Rita Copeland and Ineke Sluiter have set out to do something about this. What they offer us is a massive sourcebook focused on grammar and rhetoric, which they refer to collectively as “language arts.” This is not a medieval term, at least in this sense. (Artes sermocinales typically designates the trivium as a whole, not just these two members of it.) But its vagueness is useful here. It embraces something that is not quite literary criticism, not quite (or not solely) poetics. It overlaps linguistics without being coextensive with it. It embraces both the interpretation of existing texts and the generation of new ones. It is instantiated in the educational curriculum but not confined to it. One thing it notably does not include, for Copeland and Sluiter, is logic or dialectic. There is some justification for this. Dialectic does seem to have been subsidiary to the other two legs of the trivium, at least in the early Middle Ages. The editors have excluded on principle the speculative “modist” grammar of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which draws heavily on logic but which they regard as belonging rather to the history of philosophy. Even so, there is a sense at times that one is reading the liberal arts equivalent of The Two Musketeers.

The readings are divided into various sections: early medieval approaches (late antique grammarians through Alcuin); twelfth-century speculation (John of Salisbury, Alan of Lille, and the like); the handbooks and poetic artes of the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and others); new thirteenth-century developments (scholasticism, civic rhetoric, and dictamen). Each section is preceded, like the individual selections, by an able and lucid introduction. A final section on “reception” focuses primarily on English texts, including selections from Lydgate, Gower, the general prologue to the Wycliffite Bible, and a Middle English text on the liberal arts based on Grosseteste. The diachronic sequence is varied by “dossiers” on two sample topics: etymology and the ablative absolute.

To their credit, the editors have not confined themselves to prefaces or other programmatic passages. They give us a real sense of what it is like to read Priscian or Servius in extenso. Given the size of the volume and the range of texts represented, a few omissions are noteworthy. Augustine's De Doctrina Christiana is absent because easily available elsewhere (though some of it is paraphrased in the prologue to the Wycliffite Bible). Room might have been found for Fulgentius's short [End Page 315] but influential interpretation of the nine muses as sequential stages of literary composition (Mitologiae 1.15). Hugh of St. Victor's Didascalicon...

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