Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500 by Matthew Kempshall (review)

Rhetoric and the Writing of History, 400-1500 has its origins in a series of lectures given by author Matthew Kempshall to undergraduate historians at Oxford University. As in a successful lecture or public oration, Kempshall starts with a useful summary of his material, and then describes it fully in a very scholarly manner, and he concludes with a back-looking survey of the lecture's subject matter. However, the lecture format seems to have led him into using too much repeated material, equal to fifty pages or more of the book.

This substantial work is divided into five chapters offering a comprehensive coverage of the subject: History and Historiography; Rhetoric and History; Invention and Narrative; Verisimilitude together with Truth; and Historiography and History. Kempshall covers such topics as Chronography, Deliberative Rhetoric, Annals and Chronicles, and the 'Renaissance', and includes an impressive Bibliography.

Perhaps inevitably, given the scope of the project, there are a number of oversights. At the end of the first millennium ad, by far the most popular works of all to be found in the major scriptoria of Northern Europe were those by Pope Gregory the Great, well ahead of those by Augustine, Jerome, or Boethius. Only the Bible was more often included in monastic libraries. Gregory's two most popular works were his Registrum Epistolarum and his Moralia in Job, most of which was composed in Constantinople, with considerable help from his dear friend, Leander of Seville. Both Gregory and Leander were well trained in rhetoric and law. Kempshall makes half a dozen references to Gregory's Moralia, but he has almost totally ignored his highly rhetorical letters, composed by a pope who owed much to Cicero and Quintilian, as well as Martianus Capella.

The book provides an impressive coverage of the medieval authors, some of them almost unknown, although King Alfred's Anglo-Saxon version of Paulus Orosius's Historiarum adversus Paganos libri vii is not mentioned, despite Kempshall's very lengthy treatment of that Spanish writer, covering sixteen pages (compared with just five pages for Eusebius and only three for Boethius).

Kempshall helpfully includes many quotations taken from the Classical authors, and he rightly points out the special popularity of Sallust. While he provides English translations for all of these passages, many have been taken from the Loeb series, some of which are very dated (originally appearing in 1912, 1920, 1922, 1929, 1949, and 1954 and so on) and recommended these days only for struggling first-year students. Far more accurate and much more modern translations have since appeared for all of these authors. A page or two with lists of all of his Classical quotations, inserted before the index, would have been a valuable addition.

When covering Sallust's account of Catiline's conspiracy, Kempshall might well have referred to the very rhetorical speeches of Cicero, with which he destroyed the conspiracy, just as he destroyed Clodia in his brilliant defence of Caelius, with plenty of dramatic irony. However, Kempshall's very full coverage of Sallust's Catiline and Jugurtha, in Rome and in North Africa, was well managed, as was his treatment of Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria.

Despite a few faults, this substantial book is likely to become a major work on history, historiography, and rhetoric during the medieval period.