ABSTRACT
As the reference from John 1 in the title would suggest, the central moment in Christian history, the Incarnation of Christ, materializes in and acts as a model for the compositional theory of the artes poetriae. In the twelfth-and thirteenthcentury arts of poetry, particularly Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria, Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, John of Garland’s Parisiana poetria, and Eberhard the German’s Laborintus, the authors depict rhetoric as textual and imagined physical body, emphasizing and erasing gendered manifestations of the body based upon their respective conceptualizations of language and genre. At the same time, the compositional theory and body ideologeme alter with theoretical shifts in the general Neoplatonic cosmology, visual epistemology, and moral aesthetics that undergird the treatises, while attitudes toward postlapserian flesh and language inform the type of body used as linguistic analogue and the presence or absence of an imagined physical body. The relative scope and purpose of each work likewise predicate inclusion of the disparate gendered embodiments of language and/or the rhetorical art itself. Depending on the degree of ornamentation suggested in relation to the nature of the subject matter, the chosen genre, and the perceived purpose of discourse formation, these authors ascribe masculine and feminine qualities to language and texts. Rather than depicting a universalized dichotomy of masculine authorship and feminine language, these manuals deploy crisscrossing continuums of gendered rhetorics ranging from the incarnational to the wanton and culminating in an image of an ineffectual, domesticated rhetoric. It is not, then, just a question of whether language/texts are embodied or gendered; instead, these manuals would suggest that the type and degree of embodiment that occur, as well as the authorial motivation for engendering a particular type or admixture, have hermeneutic
import. Using body metaphors, these authors articulate the debates about language, knowledge, and gender played out on those bodies, illustrating their immersion in or cognizance of the broader linguistic discussions of the period and hinting at a more complete conceptualization of composition than suggested in earlier studies. As a result, the corporeal provides a hermeneutic paradigm for reading the treatises, understanding their theories, and tracing the transmission of both in other medieval works.1
