Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Rita Copeland

What rhetorical traditions did the Middle Ages inherit from antiquity? The first part of this chapter outlines those traditions: a partial corpus of Ciceronian rhetoric; Horace’s Ars poetica; the Rhetoric of Aristotle which was not known until the thirteenth century. The second part considers how emotions figure across rhetorical doctrine in antiquity and the Middle Ages. The third part of the chapter considers the relation of this work to emotions studies and history of emotions more broadly. The fourth part of this Introduction considers the relation between theory and practice, and the sources from which we draw our understanding of medieval rhetoric and the emotions: from theoretical treatises, from rhetorical practice, and the intersections of the two.

Author(s):  
Rita Copeland

Rhetoric is an engine of social discourse and the art charged with generating and swaying emotion. The history of rhetoric provides a continuous structure by which we can measure how emotions were understood, articulated, and mobilized under various historical circumstances and social contracts. This book is about how rhetoric in the West from Late Antiquity to the later Middle Ages represented the role of emotion in shaping persuasions. It is the first book-length study of medieval rhetoric and the emotions, coloring in what has largely been a blank space between about 600 CE and the cusp of early modernity. Rhetoric in the Middle Ages, as in other periods, constituted the gateway training for anyone engaged in emotionally persuasive writing. Medieval rhetorical thought on emotion has multiple strands of influence and sedimentations of practice. The earliest and most persistent tradition treated emotional persuasion as a property of surface stylistic effect, which can be seen in the medieval rhetorics of poetry and prose, and in literary production. But the impact of Aristotelian rhetoric, which reached the Latin West in the thirteenth century, gave emotional persuasion a core role in reasoning, incorporating it into the key device of proof, the enthymeme. In Aristotle, medieval teachers and writers found a new rhetorical language to explain the social and psychological factors that affect an audience. With Aristotelian rhetoric, the emotions became political. The impact of Aristotle’s rhetorical approach to emotions was to be felt in medieval political treatises, in poetry, and in preaching.


Traditio ◽  
1964 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
pp. 115-178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan Kuttner ◽  
Antonio García Y García

Two years ago we briefly announced the discovery of a new document of great interest for the history of the Fourth Lateran Council. Written in Spring 1216 as a letter from Rome, presumably by a German, it was copied by a thirteenth-century scribe into a manuscript now at the Universitäts-bibliothek of Giessen, where it follows directly after the constitutiones of the council. With its detailed and vivid description of the three plenary sessions and of many events that took place in between, the anonymous report adds considerably to the information we possess from other sources. But although other portions of the Giessen codex have been known and used by many scholars ever since the eighteenth century, this text has been overlooked to the present day. It is a happy coincidence that we are able to present this eyewitness account of the greatest of the ecumenical councils of the Middle Ages while the Second Vatican Council is in session.


2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (33) ◽  
pp. 96
Author(s):  
Hatmansyah Hatmansyah

The Umayyah dynasty became a major force in the development of propaganda spread throughout the world as well as being one of the first centers of political, cultural and scientific studies in the world since the Middle Ages. At the height of its greatness, its success in expanding Islamic power was far greater than that of the Roman empire. The history of Islamic preaching in the Umayyah Dynasty can be divided into two periods in the dynasty era in Damascus and in Cordoba. Islamic da'wah at this time was carried out in three stages, first the expansion of the da'wah area, the second was the development of science and the third was economic thought.


Traditio ◽  
1967 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 313-413 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles H. Lohr

The history of Latin Aristotelianism reaches roughly from Boethius to Galileo — from the end of classical civilization to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Whereas the early Middle Ages knew only a part of Aristotle's logic, the whole Aristotelian corpus became known in the period around 1200. From the middle of the thirteenth century to the end of the Middle Ages, and in some circles even beyond, the influence of these works was decisive both for the system of education and for the development of philosophy and natural science.


Traditio ◽  
1974 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 259-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael McVaugh

A number of recently published studies have drawn attention to the ‘radical moisture,’ a concept developed in classical antiquity and the Middle Ages to help explain the nature of life and the occurrence of aging and of fevers. These studies have examined the broad history of the concept over a span of two thousand years; they have, however, not presented in detail the sequence of the transmission and evolution of the concept in the Middle Ages. It is my intent to focus upon the history of the radical-moisture concept in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, to try to establish the particular stages by which it entered medieval medical doctrine, and in particular to examine the importance of Avicenna's Canon for western physicians in consolidating their first disorganized impressions of the concept. I shall illustrate the stages in the transmission process by referring to the use of the concept at the University of Montpellier, for that school has left us a number of texts from the thirteenth century that reveal how the introduction of new Arabic or Greek medical works could alter the medieval academic physician's approach to a familiar topic; they also reveal the way in which personal tastes and interests could lead colleagues to react differently to new materials.


1996 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 431-449
Author(s):  
Michael Brett

Despite their period from the tenth to the twelfth century, at the height of the Middle Ages; despite their position in Egypt, at the centre of the civilization of the Near and Middle East; and despite their prominence as the third Caliphate of Islam, the Fāṭimids lack a satisfactory modern history of their dynasty. This is partly because of the length of their life, which covers the histories of so many hundreds of years; partly because of the span of their empire from North Africa to Egypt and Syria, stretching across the histories of so many regions; and finally because, at the level of Islam itself, their empire was divided between their dawla or state and their daՙwa or doctrine. The doctrine, which focused on the Fāṭimid Imām as the quṭb or pole of faith, gave the dynasty its peculiar strength and endurance. The failure of that doctrine to supersede the Islam of the schools, however, left the Fāṭimids increasingly isolated and ultimately vulnerable. Standing outside the mainstream of Islamic tradition, the dynasty's own version of its history was disregarded. Instead, its components passed out of their original context to be incorporated into the regional or universal histories of subsequent authors. Maqrīzī was alone in compiling his Ittiՙāẓ al-ḥunafā' as a history of the dynasty in Egypt, introduced by a miscellany of information on its origins and previous career.


Literator ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
pp. 48-61
Author(s):  
A. G.P. Van der Walt

According to the well-known expert on medieval rhetoric, James J. Murphy, the three typical medieval forms of rhetoric are the art of letter writing, the art of preaching and the art of poetry (Murphy, 1971, p. xv). In this paper we are concerned only with the second of these arts, namely, the rhetoric of preaching. Though the perceptive treatises on the rhetoric of preaching, the so-called artes praedicandi, did not originate before the thirteenth century, pulpit rhetoric was very much alive in the earlier part of the Middle Ages and fine examples of this kind of eloquence can be quoted.


Archaeologia ◽  
1829 ◽  
Vol 22 ◽  
pp. 204-284
Author(s):  
Thomas Amyot

Conceiving that the pages of our Transactions cannot be better occupied than by the publication of such early and authentic manuscripts as may serve to throw light on obscure periods of our ancient History, I beg leave to lay before the Society a transcript which I have caused to be made from the Harleian Library of a Chronicle containing a very minute relation of some remarkable events in the two last years of Edward the Third, which, as our Vice President, Mr. Hallam, has observed in his History of the Middle Ages, have been slurred over by most of our general historians.


Author(s):  
George Garnett

Chapter 5 analyses three genres of historical writing about England in the later middle ages: histories of individual churches, universal histories, and histories of the kingdom. It confirms the provisional judgement reached in Chapter 4: that with respect to the Conquest and earlier England, historical writing fossilized. There were, however, exceptions, most of which could be categorized in the first genre. These are examined in great detail, and follow on from the treatment of the unusual episodes recorded during the thirteenth century at St Augustine’s, Canterbury and Burton Abbey which were considered in Chapter 4. The first is the problematic, neglected Historia Croylandensis attributed to (Pseudo-)Ingulf, which is for the most part a fabrication of the fourteenth or fifteenth century, but which masquerades as the work of the abbot at Crowland at the end of the eleventh century, and therefore as contemporaneous with the great post-Conquest histories of England. The second is the early fourteenth-century Lichfield Chronicle, written by Alan of Ashbourn. The third is a general history of England conventionally attributed to John Brompton, abbot of Jervaulx in the early fifteenth century, and perhaps written at the abbey. All three pay a great deal of attention to (different) twelfth-century compilations of Old English and immediately post-Conquest law. This unusual characteristic accounts for their exceptional interest in the Conquest. The chapter also includes a briefer discussion of the more conventional histories into which condensed earlier discussions of the Conquest were inserted.


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