Medieval rhetorics of prose composition: five English 'artes dictandi' and their tradition, edited with introductions and notes (review)

Reviews Camargo, Martin, Medieval rhetorics of prose composition:fiveEnglish 'artes dictandi' and their tradition, edited with introductions and note (Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 115), Binghamton (NY), 1995; cloth; pp. xiv, 256; R R P US$45.00. This volume provides an excellent, valuable and hitherto unavailable insight into the everyday world of the teacher (and student) of dictamen in later medieval England, by the leading student of that topic. Readers of this journal will recall a similar pioneer study (without texts, however) into the everyday world of the Florentine grammarian in the time of Dante, by Paul Gehl (A moral art: grammar, society, and culture in trecento Florence, Cornell UP, 1993, reviewed Parergon 12.2). Dictaminal treatises in England from the twelfth century onwards provided adaptations of French (rather than Italian) teachingson the composition of letters and business documents for a variety of day-to-day diplomatic, legal and administrative uses, both in French and in Latin. The training they provided influenced prose and poetic styles in all the languages used in later medieval Britain (Latin, French and even English). The present volume, building on the early work of Denholm-Young, Pantin, Richardson and others, provides an expert introduction on the history of dictamen in England from its introduction in the twelfth century to its decline before the onset of humanism in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries. This introduction indicates works already edited, locates the place and significance of the works in the present volume and suggests what major French and Italian dictaminal treatises were circulating in British manuscripts. Without providing absolutely satisfactory indication of the institutional teaching context (university, grammar-school, private school, etc.) of the major works edited, Martin Camargo announces two broad streams of treatise. The first was more theoretical and generally compositional in nature, and was possibly used in connection with arts teaching at Oxford University in the fourteenth andfifteenthcenturies; the second was more pragmatic, offering a collection of examples and models, providing a kind of 'business course' presumably offered privately and aiming to equip students with what they needed to move directiy into positions as estate managers or secretaries to bishops or noblemen (p. 27). P A R E R G O N ns 14.1 (July 1996) 278 Reviews Four of the five treatises edited in this volume relate to thefirsttradition, with one example of the 'business-course' type. Each treatise is admirably and clearly edited with an introduction on manuscripts, author and text, an apparatus criticus and explanatory notes. Thefirstis a Libellus de arte dictandi rhetorice which m a y be that of Peter of Blois, a celebrated late-twelfth-century English courtier, humanist and letter-writer. (Interestingly, the form rhetorice differs from the medieval spelling usually offered in the text itself, for example 'rethorice'.) Although elementary and derivative, the work offers insights into contemporary literary attitudes, dividing Dictaminum into metricum and prosaicum, with the latter further subdivided into epistola, historia, invectiva, exposicio (glosa), doctrina, rethorica oracio (causa), mutuo collocucio (informed and witty discourse at feast-day gatherings, with an emphasis upon recreation). The Compilacio de arte dictandi by Master John Briggis (Oxford, 14th-15th century) and the Formula moderni et usitati dictaminis by the well-known contemporary Oxfordian Thomas Merke come next, the latter unique for its recasting of ars poetria doctrines for dictaminal purposes. Thomas Sampson's 'business-course' Modus dictandi then indicates the nature of the private teacher-scholar's practical introduction to business and administrative career matters. Sampson was a fourteenth-century Oxfordian who dominated the teaching of these topics and his short treatise is severely practical. The final treatise edited in the volume is an allegorical presentation of rhetorical stylistic theory, subject amplification and epistolary theory, introducing a series of paired exemplary letters, the Regina sedens Rhetorica. (Again the medieval spelling is adopted for the treatise proper.) The longest treatise in the volume, this text seems to reflect Oxford teaching in the fifteenth century. While these are not the most important European dictaminal treatises, their presence in the volume under review nevertheless revolutionises the study of English dictamen and provides a graphic illustration of medieval stylistic theories and administrative/business vocabulary. A s a...