Introduction
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.