ABSTRACT
The Middle Ages were not so monolithic as nonmedievalists like to assume, and the fortunes of "primary rhetoric" were not identical for every time and place. In northern Italy, rhetoric was already well on its way toward recovering many important elements of its classical identity, and elsewhere there were periods of revival as well. The doctrines of the dictatores not only were an important component of the university’s arts curriculum but also seems to have been taught in the secondary grammar schools already in the 13th century. Any attempt to describe all the local permutations of the relationship between grammatical and rhetorical approaches to composition during the Middle Ages must wait until a great deal more work with primary sources has been done. There are real and important differences between an advanced composition course conceived as an ars rhetorica at Bologna and one conceived as an ars grammatica at Oxford.
