Teaching the Tropes in the Middle Ages: The Theory of Metaphoric Transference in Commentaries on the Poetria nova

In a plenary lecture at the 1983 Fourth Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric, Brian Vickers argued that we should stop studying medieval rhetoric: C. S. Baldwin had been right in his condemnation of this confused and confusing field 50 years earlier. ¹ Time spent on medieval rhetoric and poetic could, according to Vickers, be spent more profitably on the history of rhetoric during other periods.