ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that rhetoric has been an educational tool geared to meet the practical demands of the legal profession. Naturally enough, because the Church was the main repository of medieval learning, all rhetoric, including legal or forensic rhetoric, acquired ecclesiastical overtones and lost its original secular and civic uses: rhetoric informed methods for resolving conflicting assertions in canon law, theology, and philosophy. The art of rhetoric was originally created as a flexible technique for training advocates to present cases in Greek and Roman law courts. For nearly 1,000 years, the study of rhetoric was at the core of both Greek and Roman education and, in one form or another, has been part of most formal education since that time. Throughout its history rhetoric has always suffered from misunderstandings concerning its meaning, value, scope, and purpose. Sparked by the rediscovery of the complete rhetorical treatises of Quintilian, Cicero, and Aristotle, classical rhetoric had a substantial resurgence in the Renaissance.
