The Medieval Reformulations of Conversation
Rhetoric as a whole fragmented during the medieval era, as did the conversational constellation in particular, not fully to cohere again until the humanist reintegration of the Renaissance. Yet the humanist recuperation did not restore an unchanged rhetoric. On the one hand, the concepts of friendship, familiarity, and conversatio had reoriented themselves around the universalizing Christian conception of community during rhetoric’s long medieval rupture, while the sermo of dialogue had begun to concern itself with that eminently Christian subject matter, the interiority of the soul. On the other hand, the ars dictaminis had shifted the medieval letter toward the public realm, and thus toward the traditional realm of oratory. Petrarch’s rediscovery of classical conversation retained these medieval innovations. The Renaissance variant of conversation that sprang from him would partly slough the theory and practice of its medieval predecessor—but the influence of Christianity and the ars dictaminis would endure.