ABSTRACT
When historians of rhetoric speak of the decline, decadence, and disintegration of rhetoric during the Middle Ages they proceed from certain assumptions about what a healthy, pure, and whole rhetoric is (or was). For modern scholars, that authentic, premedieval rhetoric was, in George Kennedy's words, " 'primarily' an art of persuasion; it was primarily used in civic life; [and] it was primarily oral." 1 It was also bound up with certain institutions, such as the Roman law courts and the Roman schools, and with the ideal of what it meant to be a Roman citizen. When the institutions and ideals that sustained this rhetoric were lost, so the official story goes, rhetoric lost its identity. And that identity was not recovered until the Renaissance, when rhetoric was reintegrated into something resembling its original institutional context. Between the fall of Rome and the rise of humanism, rhetoric did not so much cease to exist as retreat from the center to the margins; or, to use a different metaphor, rhetoric fragmented and then fused with several related disciplines more central to medieval life. Insofar as rhetoric was concerned with methods of discovery and proof, it was swallowed up by dialectic; insofar as it was concerned with verbal ornament, it was swallowed up by grammar and poetry; insofar as it was the culmination of the ideal citizen's training, it was swallowed up by moral theology and homiletics. As a distinct and practical art rhetoric either ceased to exist or endured in one of those secondary written forms that Kennedy collectively labeled letteraturizzazione. 2 Whether reduced to a catalogue of figures (the colores rhetorici) or to the mechanical formulas of the ars dictaminis, medieval rhetoric was a poor and diminished thing by comparison with its classical forebear. Even the art of preaching, though arguably a form of primary rhetoric in its concern with oral persuasion in the service of moral virtue, turns out to be just as guilty of the sterile formalism and the divorce of theory from practice, part from whole, and form from function that vitiated its secondary sister arts. During the long medieval interregnum the full and authentic rhetoric lay dormant, preserved in a few precious copies of the De oratore and the full text of Quintilian buried in monastic libraries. Or it lived at best a shadow existence in technical treatises such as the De inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium, which generations of scribes and teachers copied and even glossed without fully understanding their contents or applying them to the practical affairs of medieval life. 3
